About the workshop

The workshops on the History of Material Texts are now in their 17th year.  Participants (including faculty, librarians, graduates, booksellers and anyone else interested) come from a very wide range of disciplines and 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, workshops will be held at 5:15 in the Lea Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library.  If you would like to receive announcements about upcoming workshops, please sign up for our listserv.  For more information, please contact Rosemary O'Neill at roneill at sas.upenn.edu.

History of Material Texts Schedule, Fall 2009

September 28
Peter Stallybrass, Penn
"What is a Book?"

October 5
Heather Wolfe, Folger Shakespeare Library
"Filing upon a point: database management in early modern England"

October 12
Rachel Buurma, Swarthmore College
"The Material Form of the Victorian Review"

October 19
NO MEETING: Fall Break

October 26
Julia Walker, Savannah College of Art and Design
"Writing on the Wall: Graffiti as Index in German Memorials."

November 2
Dan Raff, Wharton
"The Immaterial Text: Literature as Information and the Google
Settlement considered as a Deal"

November 9
Eileen Reeves, Princeton
"Sunspots: Black, White, and Read All Over"

November 16
Will Noel, Walters Museum, Baltimore
"The Archimedes Palimpsest, Digital Manuscripts, and Creative Commons"

November 23
Thomas Fulton, Rutgers
"Milton's Commonplaces"

November 30
Terry Belanger, Rare Book School, U. of Virginia
"Material Books in American Material Libraries: A Theoretical Lecture"

December 7
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
"On Biblical Publicity"

SPRING 2008 Schedule

January 21:       
NO SEMINAR: Martin Luther King Day

January 28:       
Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
"What is an Electronic Book? From Project Gutenberg to the Kindle"

February 4  
Roger Chartier, University of Pennsylvania and College de France
"Cardenio without Shakespeare"

February 11   
Yaacob Dweck, University of Pennsylvania
"Jewish Scribal Culture in an Age of Print: The Writing Practices of Leon Modena"

February 18  
Juliet Fleming, Cambridge University
"Damask papers and the English press, 1500-1700"

February 25  
Gwendolyn Shaw, University of Pennsylvania
"Topsy at the Dressing Table: Visual Apocrypha and Uncle Tom's Cabin"

March 3       
Johanna Drucker, University of Virginia
"Charles Forster and the idea of the Alphabet"

March 10 
NO SEMINAR (Spring Break)

March 17     
Lorraine Piroux, Rutgers University
"Palpable Texts and the Rupture of the Mimetic Pact from Diderot to Beaumarchais"

March 24       
Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University
"Making Love: The Matter of Sonnets from Petrarch to Wyatt"

March 31       
David Nord, University of Indiana
"Stalking the Readers of Journalism: Elusive Evidence of Ephemeral Reading"

April 7  
Joseph Rezek, University of California, Los Angeles and the Library Company of Philadelphia
"To London and Back: The Reprinting of Washington Irving in the Age of Scott"

MONDAY April 14               
PAUL SAENGER, Curator of Rare Books, Newberry Library
THE A.S.W. ROSENBACH LECTURES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Christian Versification"

TUESDAY April 15               
PAUL SAENGER, Curator of Rare Books, Newberry Library
THE A.S.W. ROSENBACH LECTURES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Birth of Modern Chapters"

THURSDAY April 17               
PAUL SAENGER, Curator of Rare Books, Newberry Library
THE A.S.W. ROSENBACH LECTURES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Printed Codex"

April 21               
Kari Kraus, University of Maryland
"Picture Criticism: Textual Studies and the Image"

April 28               
William Sherman, University of York
"Method and Madness: Walter Conrad Arensberg Between Baconianism and 
Surrealism;


FALL 2007 SCHEDULE

September 10:       
Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania
"Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History"
 
September 17:       
Joan De Jean, University of Pennsylvania
"What is an author anyway?"

September 24  
Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
"Michelangelo on Paper"

October 1   
Willman Spawn, Library, Bryn Mawr College, and Thomas Kinsella, Stockton College
"When You Don't Find What You Expected -- What Next?"

October 8  
Cynthia Hahn, Rutgers University
"Living Letters: the Enlivenment of the Word in Medieval Art "

October 15  
NO SEMINAR: FALL BREAK

October 22       
Karen Nipps, Houghton Library, Harvard University
"The Last of the Widow-Printers: Lydia Bailey Redux"
October 29 

Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College
" Two Vecellios: prints and printing in a 1590 and 1598 costume book "

November 5     
Lawrence Schoenberg, collector, independent scholar and Trustee of the University of Pennsylvania
"A Collector's Life"

November 12       
Michael Suarez, Fordham and Oxford Universities
"Survival or Loss? : The Ultimate Question in the History of Material Texts"

November 19       
Jennifer Woods-Rosner and Andrea Krupp, Library Company of Philadelphia
"Philadelphia Bookbinders" and "Nineteenth-century Bookcloth "

November 26  
Janine Barchas, University of Texas at Austin
"Facing the Page"

December 3               
Mark Vessey, Classics, University of British Columbia
"Writing before Literature: Rome, Christianity and the Western Textual Turn "



Spring Schedule, 2007

Fall Schedule, 2006