Virtual and In-Person Courses

The Rosenbach Museum & Library proudly connects with people all of the world through its robust and engaging slate of digital and in-person course offerings. Below you’ll find information on each of the course offerings for the winter 2025 season. Capacity is limited for all courses and early registration is recommended! You can find a full calendar of upcoming events, both in-person and virtual, here.

A black and white photo of a man in a suit sitting beside a poster with the text "Dracula."

SOLD OUT
Reading Dracula
with Edward G. Pettit
Online Course
Multiple dates beginning Thursday, January 23, 2025

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has become the ur-text of vampire fiction and lore. Stoker researched and wrote the novel over seven years, synthesizing vampire folklore and fiction to create a work that has continued to inspire fiction and film for over a hundred years. Many of the “rules” for both vampires and their hunters take their cue from Stoker’s novel. The Rosenbach Museum & Library is the home of Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula, over 100 pages of outlines, early plot ideas, and research notes compiled by the author over the years he developed and wrote the novel. Also in our holdings are first editions of the novel, including its first paperback publication. 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. Along the way we’ll share copious images of Stoker’s notes and early editions to see how he first conceived his work, then altered his vision of the vampire. Finally, we’ll consider how the many adaptations of Count Dracula in film, television, and print have impacted the legacy of Stoker’s novel. You can find more about our Dracula and vampire-related materials here.   

About the Instructor 
Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach. In 2020, he hosted Sundays with Dracula, a live 28-week series exploring Stoker’s novel, chapter-by-chapter. This Biblioventures series has also featured Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, The Pickwick Papers, and most recently, Sherlock Holmes. Pettit has also helped organize the Rosenbach’s marathon readings of Dracula. He continues his vampiric interest in his personal life as a consulting editor for the Dracula Beyond Stoker magazine. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information

 

An open book showing an illustration of a Black woman beside text that reads, "The New Negro, An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke"

Reading the Harlem Renaissance with Michele Lisa Simms-Burton
Online Course
Multiple dates beginning Tuesday, February 4, 2025 

One of the most creative and intellectually productive eras in American history, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was fueled by the contributions of African Americans in music, art, and literature. 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.

About the Instructor 
Historian and scholar Dr. Michele L. Simms-Burton, a former professor of African American studies at Howard University, leads discussions that examine the creators and the works that came alive during the Harlem Renaissance, a period whose influence continues to be felt.

Full Schedule and Registration Information


A paining of a White woman peering over an open book

SOLD OUT
Reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey with Claudia L. Johnson

Online Course
Multiple dates beginning Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Northanger Abbey is a thoroughly charming and fun book. Though often considered the lightweight, the little sister of Austen’s five other novels, Northanger Abbey is also Austen’s most ambitious workwhere she celebrates novels as the place where the “greatest powers of the mind are displayed. . . in the best chosen language.” A pretty cheeky claim for an unpublished novelist, no?  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.  We will, in short, read Northanger Abbey as a Gothic novellight and bright and sparkling,” to be sure, but Gothic.   

About the instructor 
Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012. She specializes in 18th- and early 19th-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. In addition to 18th-century courses, she teaches courses on Gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, detective fiction, Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago, 2012) won the Christian Gauss Award in 2013. More recently she has published a deluxe edition of Jane Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra (Princeton, 2018) in collaboration with artist Leon Steinmetz, and 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen (Blackwell, 2020) in collaboration with Clara Tuite. Her other books include The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen, ed. with Clara Tuite (Blackwell, 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), which won an Honorable Mention for the MLA Lowell Prize, and Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988). In addition, she is keenly interested in textual scholarship and has prepared editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield ParkSense and SensibilityNorthanger Abbey and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice. Her research has been supported by major fellowships, such as the NEH and the Guggenheim. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information


A black and white photo of James Joyce crouched in a field with his head in his hands
   

LIMITED SEATS
Ulysses Weekly with Robert Berry
Online Course
Ongoing through Thursday, June 5, 2025

Sponsored by Lenni Steiner and Perry Lerner

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 even deeper into a book whose depths never seem to end.  Most of all, the best way to read Ulysses is with a group, over an extended period of time (with an expert leader), in a shared experience.  The Rosenbach, home of one of the great Joyce collections in the world, including the most complete manuscript of Ulysses in existence, has been providing this experience for decades. Included in this course will be both an in person and an online presentation of our Joyce materials.  

About the instructor 
Robert Berry is a Philadelphia artist and educator who has spent over a decade translating James Joyce’s Ulysses into comics and other media. He teaches courses in comics and Ulysses at the University of Pennsylvania and is known throughout the Joyce community for his work on ULYSSES “Seen” and his regular contributions to the James Joyce Quarterly. He occasionally still has time to paint pretty pictures and has been leading courses on Ulysses at the Rosenbach since 2017. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information


Teh title page of a book showing the text, "Mary Shelley's Prometheus"
 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man with Vivian Papp
Online Course
Multiple dates beginning Tuesday, February 11, 2025

The Last Man’s Lionel Verney stares forlornly at us from the solitude of his cave in Naples, warning us of the dangers of complacency, “To survive is not enough, we must rebuild and reinvent ourselves.” Haunting the murky perimeters of modern society since 1818, Shelley’s much more well-known Monster laments, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall be virtuous again.” What can these two solitary humans teach us about what it means to be alive, to live, to be a person, or merely to just be? How do we navigate ever-evolving modes of existence, modes which blur the constantly shifting lines which tenuously separate humanity from technology? These are only a few of the questions posed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) that remain unanswered. 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.   

About the instructor 
Dr. Vivian Zuluaga Papp is a Doctoral Lecturer in the English Department at the New York City College of Technology CUNY in Brooklyn, NY. She is known to quote from Frankenstein with little to no provocation. A scholar of the epistemology of vision, her work focuses on science writing and the early novel, with a special interest in the field of visual technology. Her chapter “Picturing Air: The Rhetoric of ‘Nondescription’ in Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-mechanical and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” will be included in an upcoming anthology on the history of science. She recently gave a talk at a conference at the University of Kent in Cambridge, UK entitled, “Seeing Things: A.I., Deepfakes, Optics, and Vision: or How Did the Enlightenment Predict our Dilemma?” She is currently working on a book project about A.I., epistemology, and fiction. She received her BA from Columbia University in New York, her MA from Hunter College CUNY, and her PhD from Fordham University in Bronx, NY. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information  


Percival Everett, a Black man with graying hair and a goatee stands before a row of green trees, backlit by the sun, look off in the distance
 

SOLD OUT
Huck and James: Reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James with Edward Whitley

Online Course

Multiple dates beginning Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved African American who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. For well over a hundred years now, Huck Finn has been a contender for the title of “Great American Novel.” Huck’s coming-of-age story told against the backdrop of the antebellum American South has resonated with young readers and literary critics alike. As far back as 1992, however, the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison encouraged us to think more critically about Huck Finn and to approach it from a perspective that allows us to “release it from its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness.” Everett’s James takes up this 30-year-old challenge with a stunning novel that forces us to see Huck, Jim, and American culture in an entirely new light. 

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.

About the instructor 
Edward Whitley is Professor and Chairperson of the English Department at Lehigh University, where he teaches courses in American literature and humanities approaches to data science. He is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and editor of the forthcoming Norton Library edition of Leaves of Grass. He is also editing the first critical edition of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Christopher N. Phillips and Zachary McLeod Hutchins for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information


Old papers with script handwriting lie on a desk beside a red leather book
 

The Sonnet in English with Sean Hughes
Online Course
Multiple dates beginning Wednesday, March 12, 2025

The sonnet is one of the most enduring and influential poetic forms. The rules are simple: fourteen lines with regular meter and rhyme. They’re broad enough to accommodate a range of styles and preoccupations but tight enough to challenge some of the greatest poets to achieve their most intense and refined work. The sonnet in English is also a deeply playful tradition. By the 16th century, poets already were writing sonnets about how artificial sonnets are. Moreover, the brevity of the sonnet makes it a great entrance point for learning to love a poet, or poetry in general. 

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. 

Each session will have a theme, but our discussions will be guided by your interests. Likely topics will include love, idolatry, and lust; feeling trapped; attention; the massive amount of effort required to seem effortless; the difficulty of meaning what you say; and the morbid implications of our desperate attempts to capture moments in time.

About the Instructor 
Sean Hughes is a Philly-based writer and editor who has taught at Bryn Mawr College and Rutgers University – New Brunswick, where he completed a PhD in English Literature in 2020. His research interests include 19th-century literature, the relationship between literature and philosophy, historicism, and poetics. His article “George Eliot, Typology, and the Moral Psychology of Historicism” was published in the Spring 2022 issue of English Literary History He has previously taught courses on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Virginia Woolf for the Rosenbach. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information


A painting of a woman in profile beside a vase of flowers
 

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai with Melissa R. Klapper
In-Person Course
 
Sunday, March 30, 2025

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 

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a vivid look at the distinctive wartime experiences of a complicated southern Jewish white woman, a slaveholder who was forced to leave her Virginia home due to the upheavals of the Civil War but maintained a fierce devotion to her family, faith, and Confederate values. The book combines an extensive scholarly introduction with the full text of the 1864-1865 diary itself, one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman. This book was initiated by the late Dr. Dianne Ashton, Professor Emerita of Philosophy and World Religion at Rowan University and completed after her passing by Dr. Melissa R. Klapper, Professor of History at Rowan University. 

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than one percent of the population of the Old South and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans. The diary charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women’s roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai’s world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home. 

In this course, students will discuss Mordecai’s diverse identities and life experiences and consider their implications for modern America. Students are encouraged to purchase a copy of the book from H&H Books, the Rosenbach’s nonprofit bookstore partner, before the course. 

About the Instructors 
Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880–1925; Ballet Class: An American History; and with Dianne Ashton, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai. In 2024, Dr. Klapper led a seminar at the Rosenbach on Ballots, Babies and Banners of Peace. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information

 

Black and white photo of Oscar Wilde

LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
Biblioventures: The Picture of Dorian Gray 

Online Program
Multiple dates beginning Monday, February 3, 2025
Sponsored by Gage Johnston and Jack I. Jallo

Join us on a new Biblioventure with a special subscription-only show on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray has a secret, but it can only be revealed if you see his painted portrait. Wilde’s book has been classified as a philosophical novel, a moral fantasy, a Gothic horror, and a gay novel (or at least a novel about suppressed homosexuality). We’ll talk through all aspects of this thrilling and terrifying book. For eight weeks, Edward G. Pettit and a team of rotating cohosts will dive deep into discussions about this groundbreaking novel, first published as a novella in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott’s Magazine. Each week, we’ll lead a conversational annotation with context and insight about Wilde and his book and field questions from the audience. As with all our Biblioventures series, we’ll also enjoy some signature cocktails, with original recipes provided to all subscribers of the program.

Joining Edward G. Pettit as rotating cohosts for Dorian Gray will be Dr. Anastasia Klimchynskaya, who has previously cohosted Sundays with Frankenstein and Sherlock Mondays; Paul M. Chapman, last seen as cohost on Monsters and Ghosts: Jekyll & Hyde; and Dr. Petra Clark and Dr. Samantha Nystrom, who have both been leading the Rosenbach’s Book Club series, The Ladies of the House of Love.

The Rosenbach has a significant collection of Oscar Wilde’s manuscripts, books, and photographs, which we will feature in several of our episodes.

For this series, we’ll use Wilde’s expanded 1891 text but will also pay close attention to the 1890 version, as well as the censored edits from Wilde’s original manuscript, many of which were made to tone down the homosexual themes of the novel.

About the Instructor 
Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach. In 2020, he hosted Sundays with Dracula, a live 28-week series exploring Stoker’s novel, chapter-by-chapter. This Biblioventures series has also featured Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, The Pickwick Papers, and most recently, Sherlock Holmes. Pettit has also helped organize the Rosenbach’s marathon readings of Dracula. He continues his vampiric interest in his personal life as a consulting editor for the Dracula Beyond Stoker magazine. 

Full Schedule and Registration Information