Join the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Abbotsford: The Home of Sir Walter Scott, in the Scottish Lowlands for a transatlantic book club experience! As the United States commemorates 250 years of independence and we mark 210 years since the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel The Antiquary, the book club will consider how national identity has been formed and reforged via history, literature, and culture in both Scotland the U.S.

The new season of Sherlock Monthly continues our exploration of the Sherlockian canon. Every month, we focus on one Sherlock Holmes adventure in the order they were first published. We begin this season with “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” Joining host Edward G. Pettit are some new cohosts and some old friends. You can watch the livestream on Saturday afternoons or the recordings on our YouTube channel.    

As we reflect on America’s 250^th anniversary, this course will look back to Vonnegut’s early 1970s attempts to restore “humane harmony” in his brain as he confronted foundational American myths, a damaged planet, and a culture that seemed like a “sidewalk strewn with junk.” Focusing on Breakfast of Champions (1973) and selected short works, this three-session course will explore the how Vonnegut used his newfound celebrity in the wake of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) to respond to the Vietnam War, the space race and other Cold War technologies, and the broader social, political, environmental, and economic breakdowns he witnessed. 

From its study of a charismatic authoritarian to its minute account of a global oil economy to the obsessive attention that it pays to the bodies and lives of whales, squid, and other denizens of the sea, Moby-Dick continues to feel very present and very urgent. In the eight sessions of this course, we will take up a slow and close reading of Melville’s monumental novel, taking our time to consider the work in its grandest visions, its most minute observations, and the overall joy with which it attends to –-and attaches us to–-the stuff of life and the world.

Join the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Abbotsford: The Home of Sir Walter Scott, in the Scottish Lowlands for a transatlantic book club experience! As the United States commemorates 250 years of independence and we mark 210 years since the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel The Antiquary, the book club will consider how national identity has been formed and reforged via history, literature, and culture in both Scotland the U.S.

In this course, we'll explore the extraordinary deeds as well as the incomparable words of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin. Each session will focus on an era and set of writings found in J.A. Leo Lemay's Library of America volumes of Franklin's writings. We'll explore Franklin's autobiography, a text of many parts and many secrets, and still one of the most read and widest studied works written in the 18^th century.

Join the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Abbotsford: The Home of Sir Walter Scott, in the Scottish Lowlands for a transatlantic book club experience! As the United States commemorates 250 years of independence and we mark 210 years since the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel The Antiquary, the book club will consider how national identity has been formed and reforged via history, literature, and culture in both Scotland the U.S.

Gayle Feldman will relate how, through hard work, inspired archival detective work, sheer luck, and knowing the proclivities of her subject, she was able to uncover new information on the role the go-betweens played in putting Joyce's Ulysses into the hands of the right publisher at the right time, who was then able to put it into the hands of waiting readers. 

Our Hobbit fun continues with this subscription-only show with two of the leading Tolkien scholars in the world, Michael D.C. Drout and Corey Olsen. In this four episode series we’ll explore the medieval works that influenced Tolkien, as well as his translations and famous essays.

This five-week course offers an in-depth exploration of Anne Brontë’s life and works. The youngest of the Brontës, Anne is sometimes overshadowed by her elder sisters, whose works have achieved greater prominence in literature and culture. Yet Anne’s writing is no less powerful or profound, offering a unique voice unafraid to confront and represent the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of 19th-century culture. Through close reading, discussion, and consideration of the historical context of her two published novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), this course will explore what Anne had to say about morality, gender, class, religion and the struggle for independence. We will give particular attention to how and why Anne wanted to interrogate and challenge Victorian social conventions with clarity and courage.  

Our course will take place across six sessions, with one week between each meeting.

In this five-session course, we will uncover some of the medieval influences upon Eliot’s most famous work, including selections from The Wasteland, Four Quartets, and Murder in the Cathedral. Along the way, we’ll investigate how and where he draws upon the Arthurian Grail cycle, Christian mysticism, and The Canterbury Tales.

Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on Horacio Quiroga—who adapted Poe’s gothic intensity and psychological suspense to the jungles and borderlands of the River Plate and Misiones—this course traces the evolution of the contemporary Latin American short story in English translation. We’ll read pivotal writers—Borges, Rulfo, Fuentes, García Márquez—and spotlight the vital contributions of women writers, including Rosario Ferré and Mariana Enríquez. 

This course will explore this theme in three plays: the perfectly formed comedy As You Like It, the searing tragedy King Lear, and the graceful romance The Winter’s Tale. Along the way, we will discover that the virtues of the green world speak especially powerfully to us today in a time of division and disruption in both the social and the natural environments.  

This book is more than a romance, more than a slice of history brought to life— it’s a detailed demonstration of how individuals of art and wit can preserve their agency in eras when it’s under attack from oppressive societal forces. In close reading, we will explore the lasting power of Stendhal’s vision and the legacy of The Charterhouse of Parma. 

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. For those returning to the novel, this will be a great way to delve into a book whose depths never seem to end.

This is the adventure of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—The Golden Compass (UK title: Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. These books are not only international bestsellers, they have been adapted for film, stage, graphic novels, and other media. In this course, we will read these books in community, following their many paths and considering their literary inheritance. 

Over the course of four biweekly meetings we’ll read some of Johnson’s most important works—essays, poems, fiction, travel narratives, biography—and selections from Boswell’s Life. The focus will always be on the humanity of the man behind the works.  

Readings from British Biography: A Reader  will inform course discussion on what makes a biography comparable in some ways to the novel and in others to works of history and literary criticism.

We’re going on a Biblioventure to Middle-Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien’s first fantasy novel, The Hobbit.

As Melville moved between historical fictions of the late-18th century and portraits of America in the 1850s, he fictionalized figures like Benjamin Franklin, rewrote the memoirs of sea captains and frontier lawmen, and captured with brutal precision and irony, elements of the American character that endure to this day. In the first three sessions of this course, we will cover one short work per week, reserving the last two sessions for the raucous satire of The Confidence-man, which Philip Roth described in 2016 as “the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel” that speaks most directly to America today.  

In this course, we'll explore this stylistic and psychological masterpiece. Each session will include some relevant background, but our discussions will be guided by the interests of our participants. Likely topics will include gender, history, cities, war, time, trauma, power, sexuality, and family.  

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.

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.

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.

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.