In this two-hour, immersive, hands-on workshop, distinguished local Irish American calligrapher and manuscript illuminator Susan Kelly vonMedicus will introduce you to Irish manuscript heritage and teach the Uncial script found in the Book of Kells and other early Irish manuscripts.

In this four-week course, we’ll journey into the pages of Wuthering Heights, the beloved novel written and published by Emily Brontë in 1847.

The Rosenbach holds in its collection the original serial parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Throughout this course, we’ll read the existing six serial parts as the first readers did, one part at a time for six sessions, then we’ll spend a final session discussing the many ways Dickens could have unspooled his final mystery, perhaps even solving the mystery of Edwin Drood itself.    

This engaging seminar, held in the Rosenbach’s historic house, will begin with a discussion of how slavery helped shape the Constitution, which ironically, was written in Pennsylvania–the first state in the nation and the first political jurisdiction in the Western World to take steps to end slavery. 

Persuasion is often considered Austen’s autumnal novel, her most mature work, and a farewell to her life as a fiction writer. In this course, we will examine the many ways in which she deploys her satire, and we will explore the novel’s themes of heartbreak, hope, personal growth, and second-chance love.  

For modern readers, the great secret of the Victorian cultural world is that lady detective characters were among the most popular in the literature of the time. In this course, we will explore many of the most popular of these characters and interrogate how they reflected the spectrum of Victorian attitudes about women and how they both played into and resisted conventional Victorian conceptions of (and anxieties about) female ability, acumen, psychology, and labor.  

This course on Midsummer Night’s Dream will be an interactive experience and will rely on your participation, enthusiasm, and free-flowing conversations. Each time we meet, we will practice a variety of reading techniques that will enable you to begin experiencing Midsummer (and eventually all of Shakespeare’s plays) more deeply and effectively on your own. 

Faulkner’s Light in August dives into the darkest corners of American history: religious fanaticism, racism, the horror of the Civil War, and the brutal legacy of lynching. In this bold masterpiece, Faulkner plays with time’s unbreakable grip.

Join the Rosenbach for a special seminar on Jewish women’s history in the beautiful parlor of the Rosenbach brothers’ home on Delancey Place. Led by gifted teacher and scholar Melissa Klapper, the course explores the new book The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai.

In this course, we’ll explore how great poets across the centuries have used the sonnet. Authors will likely include William Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Keats, Christina Rosetti, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Terrance Hayes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wanda Coleman, William Butler Yeats, and Percy Shelley. This course will be enjoyable for both people who are new to reading poetry and aficionados alike. 

• February 20, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• February 27, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• March 6, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• March 13, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• March 20, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• March 27, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• April 3, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• April 10, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• April 17, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• April 24, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• May 1, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• May 8, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• May 15, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• May 22, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• May 29, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• June 5, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

This immersive weekly course will help readers explore (and enjoy) the intricacies, enigmas and hilarities of Ulysses. First time readers of the novel will find many resources for understanding this challenging work.

In this five-week online class, we will spend the first two weeks reading Huckleberry Finn. For our third meeting, we will explore the legacy of Huck and Jim in African American culture with a series of short readings from authors such as Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and John Keene. We will spend the final two weeks reading Everett’s James.

In this class we will map a chronological route through these two texts from 1818 to today. Shelley will have us rethinking our positions as human beings in a world where the giddy rate of technological advancement far exceeds our potential to maintain even the slightest semblance of balance.  

Our class will examine Austen’s simple-seeming language carefully. Having told us that “A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can,” we will consider the knowledge this novel conceals beneath its sunny un-Gothic surface. 

Informed by the Rosenbach’s Langston Hughes and Alaine Locke holdings, during the four sessions of this course, we will read and discuss works by four prominent Harlem Renaissance writers and intelligentsia: Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

• January 23, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

• February 6, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

• February 20, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

• March 6, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

• March 20, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

In this course we’ll consider how Dracula highlights the fears and anxieties of the culture that produced it and discover how this vampire story is just as much about themes of difference and otherness, race and ethnicity, and sexuality and gender, issues still relevant for contemporary readers.

• November 13, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• December 11, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• January 8, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• February 12, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• March 19, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

• April 9, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

In this course, which welcomes first-time Melville readers and Moby-Dick obsessives alike, our discussions will range from the novel’s most thunderous, epic heights to its quirkiest, crudest jokes.

This course will explore the richness and depth of this remarkable text, with close consideration of the work’s language, action, characterization, worldview, and more.