Workshop in the History of Material Texts
About the Workshop
The workshop in the History of Material Texts is now in its 20th year. Participants (including faculty, librarians, graduate students, booksellers and anyone else interested) come from a very wide range of disciplines; all are welcome to attend. The usual format of the seminar is a presentation of approximately thirty minutes, followed by discussion, based if possible on handouts or other visual materials. Unless noted otherwise, meetings will be held on Mondays at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room on the second floor of Van Pelt Library. If you would like to receive announcements about upcoming meetings, please sign up for our listserv using this link. For more information, please contact Simran Thadani, 2012-13 Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts, at sthadani at english dot upenn dot edu.
Schedule
Spring 2013
January 14: Michael Gamer (Penn English)
"Re-collection's Intranquility"
January 21: MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, no seminar
January 28: Peter Stallybrass (Penn English / Director, History of Material Texts) and Robbie Glen (independent scholar; Penn English Ph.D., 2007)
"What is a Letter?"
February 5 (TUESDAY): Luis Girón Negrón (Harvard University) and Andrés Enrique-Arias (Universitat de les Illes Balears)
"Bible Translation and Exegesis in Late Medieval Spain: the 15th Century Arragel Codex"
February 11: Dan Cheely (Penn History)
"Catholic Bible Reading? Penn's Tridentine Vulgate (1605) and the Marginalia of Thomas Marwood"
February 18: John Pollack (Penn Libraries)
"A Canoa in Salamanca: Orality and the Representation of Native American Languages in Early American Texts"
February 25: Roger Chartier (Collège de France / Penn History)
"Materiality and Mobility of a Text: Bartolomé de Las Casas’ "Brevíssima Relación de la Destruycion de las Indias" between Sevilla, Antwerp and London"
March 4: SPRING BREAK, no seminar
March 11: Mitch Fraas (Penn Libraries)
"Printing for Emphasis: The Legal Brief in the Anglo-American World 1600-present"
March 18, 19, 21 (MONDAY, TUESDAY, THURSDAY): Rosenbach Lectures
Paul Needham (Princeton University Libraries)
"The First Quarter Century of European Printing"
see <http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/rosenbachs.html> for more information and to register
(Dr. Needham will also convene a special seminar on WEDNESDAY March 20)
March 25: Jim Kearney (University of California - Santa Barbara)
"Smelling the Gospel"
April 1: Michael Leja (Penn History of Art)
"Picture Books for the Masses: the Fairy Book and the Pictorial Bible by J. A. Adams, J. G. Chapman, and Harper Brothers, 1836-1846"
April 8: Hannah Farber (University of California - Berkeley / McNeil Center for Early American Studies)
"Ships and Good Order: Illuminated Capitals in Early American Bills of Lading"
April 15: David Scott Kastan (Yale University)
"The Body of the Text"
April 22: Michael F. Suarez (Rare Book School / University of Virginia)
"Is this Bibliography? Tracking the History of the Slave Ship Image in Print"
(Dr. Suarez will also convene a special seminar on TUESDAY April 23)
Fall 2012
September 10: James N. Green (Library Company of Philadelphia)
"Benjamin Franklin’s Book Shop"
September 17: Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library) and Jana Dambrogio (National Archives and Records Administration)
"Early Modern Letter Locking Techniques in Theory and Practice: Silk Floss, Seals and Folds"
September 24: Bernard Cooperman (University of Maryland)
"The Zohar — and a Bit of Hebrew Grammar On the Side: The Business of Hebrew Printing in the Italian Renaissance"
October 1: Mary E. Fissell (Johns Hopkins University)
"When a Masterpiece Becomes a Chameleon: Re-Making a Popular Medical Book in the 1830s and 40s"
October 8: Consuela (Chela) Metzger (Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library/University of Delaware)
"Conservation and the Material Text"
October 15: Joseph Rezek (Boston University)
"Furious Booksellers: the Transatlantic Publication of the Waverley Novels and the Language of the Book Trade"
October 22: Fall Break
October 29: meeting rescheduled due to Hurricane Sandy
November 5: Dan Hobbins (Notre Dame)
"Toward a History of the Authorial Colophon"
November 12: Andrew Piper (McGill University)
"Deleafing: The History of Losing Print"
November 19: William Noel (University of Pennsylvania)
"Picking up the Pieces: What happened to a Manuscript Illuminated by W. De Brailes"
November 26: Peter Decherney (University of Pennsylvania)
"The Creativity Crisis: Innovation and the Shrinking Public Domain"
December 3: Jessica Rosenberg (University of Pennsylvania)
"Garden, Bower, Nosegay, Posy: On Some Early Modern Collections"
December 10: Rebecca Laroche (University of Colorado - Colorado Springs)
"Roses in Winter: Materials Texts and the Living Environment"