All Program Dates
October 6, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET
October 13, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET
October 20, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET
October 27, 2025 | 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $220.
Registration for Rosenbach community members opens Wednesday, July 16! Use the code ROSENBACH10 to receive a 10% discount.
Follow the link below to register for the course on the Barnes’s website:
Description
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. What defined each of these creators as modernist pioneers? How did they respond to both the possibilities and perils of modern life—and how did their innovations coincide with a dynamic engagement with tradition? We will approach each artist on his own terms while also tracing collaborations and shared networks among them. In our final session, we will bring a comparative lens to their major contributions to literature, music, and the visual arts and ultimately ask: can we speak of modernism in the singular at all? Course instructors are literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour, musician Mimi Stillman, and art historian Naina Saligram.
This class is a new collaboration between the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Barnes, two Philadelphia institutions committed to championing and interrogating cultural expressions of modernity. Holdings at the Rosenbach, including a handwritten manuscript of Joyce’s Ulysses and a score for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and the Barnes’s collection of paintings and drawings by Picasso will form the backbone of our study.
Join us for a unique opportunity to read, listen, and look closely while we think about modernism as a phenomenon that transcended discrete disciplines, leaving a legacy that is still felt, and debated, today.
Sponsors
Our Modernism Across Media course collaboration with the Barnes is sponsored by Karen Flannery James and George James.
Facilitators
Paul Saint-Amour is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. He also co-edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press.
Naina Saligram is a fellow researching the 46 works by Picasso in the Barnes. She has held curatorial, research, and teaching positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery. Saligram has also taught Barnes classes on topics such as primitivism and surrealism.
An acclaimed flutist, Mimi Stillman is an internationally recognized solo, chamber, and recording artist who the New York Times has called “not only a consummate and charismatic performer, but also a scholar. Her programs tend to activate ear, heart, and brain.” She is the founding artistic director of the Dolce Suono Ensemble. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music with a MA in history from the University of Pennsylvania, she is a published author on music and history, with a focus on late 19th- and early 20th-century French culture.