Department of English
Material Texts
The Material Texts Workshop is an affiliated working group. Affiliated working groups are coordinated and funded outside of the Department of English.
For a schedule of current events and a searchable archive of past presentations, please visit the website for the Workshop in the History of Material Texts.
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts has been meeting weekly since its founding in 1993. Participants (including faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, booksellers and anyone else interested) come from a wide range of disciplines.
All are welcome to attend; ongoing attendance is not required, and many people come only to the occasional meeting. Meetings are held on Mondays at 5:15 in the Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.
If you would like to receive announcements about upcoming meetings, please sign up for our listserv using this link. More information can be found on the website.
Upcoming Events
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Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Many Lives of Renaissance Woodblocks: The Case of Ulisse Aldrovandi's Collection."
October 20, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Josh Mugler (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), "Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia."
October 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print."
November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania), "‘Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics."
November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe."
November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."
November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Emily Green (George Mason University), "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."
December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Marcy Norton (Penn): "Indigenous Epistemology and Early Modern Science: The Creation of 'De historia animalium Novae Hispaniae' (1571–1577)"
November 14, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn): "The Ten Commandments and/as Erasable Wax Tablets"
November 7, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jamal Elias (Penn): "Writing Commentaries on Non-existent Texts: The Mystery of Ismail Ankaravi’s Commentary on the 7th Volume of Rumi’s Masnavi"
October 31, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Elly Truitt (Penn): "Why Are Clocks?"
October 24, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center): "Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband”
October 17, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexis Hagadorn (Columbia University Libraries): "Reading Medieval Parchment through an Eighteenth-Century Lens"
October 10, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Barberie (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "Richard Benson and the End of Printed Pictures"
October 3, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ulrich von Bülow (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach): "W. G. Sebald's Papers and Photographs"
September 26, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joseph Rezek (Boston University): "Ideologies of the Codex in Richard Hakluyt and John Smith"
September 19, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sean Quimby (Penn Libraries): "Making the First Black Comic Book"
September 12, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm