Portrait miniatures originated in 16th century Europe, where these small, hand-painted likenesses were designed to be portable and personal keepsakes. They were tokens of affection, mementos of loved ones, and status symbols. Painted on vellum or ivory, they were often framed with precious metals and jewels like cameos. The tradition continued until the advent of photography in the mid-19th century.   

In “DEAR JOHN,” a special exhibition in the Rosenbach’s Treasures: History of the Material Text gallery, artist John Wind takes inspiration from this tradition but shifts the emphasis from the subject to the frame—concocting elaborate, exuberant compositions that provide a more modern take on the genre. 

Make your own Portrait Miniature in this in-person workshop. Bring a small photo or print of a favorite image (up to about 4”x5”) and Wind will provide all the other supplies needed to embellish and frame the image in a meaningful and personal way.  

Capping off our year of Jane Austen seminars to commemorate the author’s 250th birthday, we’ll finish with her most beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice, led by Louise Curran from the University of Birmingham, UK.

We will read and discuss Pride and Prejudice in all its simple and complicated glory, thinking about its depiction of courtship and marriage, its structure as the archetypal romantic comedy, and its place within Austen’s literary career. 

This seminar will examine the history of birthright citizenship (dating from at least 1608),the regulation of immigration from the adoption of the Constitution to the Civil War, and the debates over the citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment.  

Musician and novelist Wesley Stace presents a unique seminar experience, an opportunity to read works of literature that attempt to capture, on the page, the essence of music.

Books have been worn for hundreds of years. Come learn how to make some wearable books based on historical miniature volumes in the Rosenbach’s collection. You will end the class with two tiny blank books that can be turned into necklaces or a pair of earrings! All materials and tools will be provided. No experience necessary.

Best known for his wildly imaginative fiction, accessible style, and unflinching critiques of American culture, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most beloved and prescient writers of the late-20th century. Focusing on Cat’s Cradle (1963) and his anti-war masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), this four-session course will explore Kurt Vonnegut’s signature literary techniques (dark humor, satire, and innovative, often time-bending narrative structures) along with his examinations of 1960s America.

“Oliver Twist has asked for more!” Edward G. Pettit will lead a seminar on one of Charles Dickens’s most popular novels. Oliver is the first child protagonist of any novel, and Dickens recounts Oliver’s adventures from a Poor Workhouse to a dangerous den of London criminals.

James Joyce was one of the 20th century’s most complex, influential, paradoxical, irreverent, domineering, problematic, and rewarding writers; Ulysses (pub. 1922) is, if not Joyce’s most difficult work, certainly his most beloved and consequential one. This reading group aims to acquaint first-time readers with Ulysses and to give those already familiar with the novel the opportunity to deepen their engagement with it.

In this course, we will explore the complexity and depth of this extraordinary text, with close attention to issues related to language, kingship, old age, gender, and more.

This course examines how African American artists, activists, and thinkers have utilized American Constitutionalism as a basis for arguments in support of Black freedom, from the U.S. founding to abolition and from emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement.

Grab your mat (and maybe your fangs and cape, too?) and join us for a candlelit, Dracula-inspired yoga practice! We’ll have some fun linking imagery and themes from this Gothic horror classic to a gentle flow yoga sequence.  

Following the practice, participants will have the opportunity to explore the Rosenbach’s vampire-related collection items during a special, private after-hours viewing of Treasures from the Rosenbach’s Collection: Literature of Great Britain & Ireland, where selections from the Rosenbach’s renowned Dracula and vampire collections are on view. Please bring your own yoga mat. Costumes encouraged!

Fitzgerald's third novel was published in April 1925. When Fitzgerald first began writing The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1921, he told his editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, "I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." We will learn about the genesis of The Great Gatsby, its critical reception when it appeared, its changing afterlife, the rise of its immense global popularity, and versions of Gatsby on stage and film as we read the novel together.  

What is published as Stephen Hero is a manuscript fragment of the first version of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which once ran to around 1,000 pages and was rejected by many publishers. We will read what remains of Stephen Hero (edited by Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon) and then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Relevant extracts will be provided from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Dracula is one of the most renowned epistolary novels of all time. The thrilling, chilling, and above all creeping dread invoked by Bram Stoker’s vampire builds within the everyday diary entries, newspaper clippings, and letters of our protagonists. 

Create your own suspense-filled letter in this two-part class.

Since 1605 Cervantes’s Don Quixote has been read as an icon of idealistic and misguided desire and as a meme of human experience, modernity, the novel, and more. Close readings and cultural contexts will enable us to enjoy Cervantes’s experimental creation and to consider why it continues to captivate its readers.   

The Rosenbach holds a significant Cervantes collection, and we will share images of this collection during the seminar. 

This class explores what we call “modernism” through cross-disciplinary analyses of works made by Irish writer James Joyce, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky in the early twentieth century.

In this two-part class (Sunday, September 7^th and Sunday, September 14^th), attendees will be immersed in the centuries-old traditions of calligraphy and bookbinding. Students will study lettering traditions from around the world, including the Uncial script found in the Book of Kells and other early Irish manuscripts, while exploring how calligraphy interacts with the book format and creating their own exciting compositions.

In this hands-on bookmaking class, learn to craft your own card-keeper recipe book and exchange recipes (and the stories behind them) with your fellow attendees. You’ll leave with a feast’s worth of recipes to try and a whole new way to share the food that matters to you with the people who matter to you. 

In this eight-session course (Wednesdays, 8/13, 8/27, 9/10, 9/24, 10/8, 10/22, 11/5, 11/19) we will try to identify the qualities that make Tolkien’s works emotionally and intellectually engaging while seeking to better understand their significance. In exploring the rich complexity of Middle-earth, the phonesthetic beauty of Tolkien’s languages, the intricacy of the narrative, and the sophistication of the moral vision, we will seek to understand not merely his works’ popularity, cultural influence, and artistic success, but the personal significance they hold for many readers.  

In this four-week course (Wednesdays, July 16, 23, 30, August 6), we will read and discuss Mansfield Park in relation to key artifacts and documents that shed light on its place in Austen’s literary career.  

In this hands-on class, you will learn to create dynamic booklets of your own, from the humble pamphlet to a single-sheet book to the French door zine. No prior zine-making experience is required. 

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.