Upcoming Events

We are thrilled to welcome James Brophy (University of Delaware) for a talk titled “Printing Political Dissent: German Publishers in the Age of Revolutions.”

 

Professor Brophy writes:

 

"Marketing political dissent in Central Europe was no easy matter. Working within and around rigorous censorship regimes from the late Enlightenment into the 1850s, German publishers brought an array of print matter to market that critiqued, satirized, and denounced the social contract of late absolutism. Drawing on a long legacy of circulating forbidden print, publishers and authors transformed the nineteenth-century public sphere through market segmentation and a variety of print wares that amplified oppositional voices for both reform and revolution, yet democratic radicalism never achieved a breakthrough in mainstream readership. While liberalism gradually attained the status of permissible dissent, the print circuits and material formats of republicanism remained marginalized and inaccessible to common readers. Based upon my 2024 study, this presentation weighs the achievements and setbacks of German publishers, whose commercial drive and innovative maneuvers contested enduring governmental resistance to a free press."

 

 

James M. Brophy is the Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he teaches modern European history. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century public sphere and censorship. Recent publications include Print Markets and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870 (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (Jan Thorbecke, 2023), co-edited with Bärbel Holtz and Gabriele Clemens.

Justin Torres, Winner of the National Book Award and author of Blackouts in conversation with Heather Love, Professor of English.

Sponsored by The Department of English, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the Gender and Sexuality Working Group (Gen/Sex).

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Poster design by Austin Svedjan

This talk will consider the status of writing in the present moment not from the qualitative question of whether AI can write better than humans, but from the stance of political economy--meaning the role of writing in what Michel de Certeau once called the "scriptural economy," as well as online industries' insatiable demand for "content" and the increasing awareness (some call this the Dead Internet) that more and more of what we read online is merely eavesdropping on conversations amongst machines.

For more information, please visit: https://pricelab.sas.upenn.edu/events/textpocalypse-now 

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Matthew Kirschenbaum (GSAS ‘99) rejoins UVA as Commonwealth Professor of AI and English after almost 25 years at the University of Maryland, where he finished as a Distinguished University Professor. He considers himself a student of texts and textual technologies in all their social and material forms, and his scholarship and teaching have explored literary intersects with printing and bookmaking, archival science, media archaeology, digital humanities, and now artificial intelligence.

He is the author of three books, most recently Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage from the University of Pennsylvania Press (2021). His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) was the winner of multiple awards, including the MLA Prize for a First Book. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016) enjoyed widespread public media attention. Recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and ELH; and he frequently writes for popular outlets, which have included the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kirschenbaum is an active member of the Modern Language Association’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and a member of the teaching faculty at Rare Book School. He has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow.

Current writing includes two books, the first on the political economy of text in the present moment and the second on the weaponization of AI in what some have called a full-blown epistemic crisis. Matthew looks forward to meeting and working with students interested in textual and media studies, experimental literature, book history, DH, and of course AI. He is a practicing letterpress printer. You can find him on Bluesky at @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social. 

 

Join us for a Writing Accountability session! Drop by (anytime) and get any of your work/projects done.

Grab some ice-cream & sorbet at the beginning of the session! (You can also just come to say hello and enjoy this treat). 

Coffee and snacks available until 4:30 pm.

This will be a hybrid event. To participate remotely, please contact the Latinx Working Group Co-Coordinators, Gema Valencia-Turco (gemavt@sas.upenn.edu) and Clara Jimenez (cjjpgr@sas.upenn.edu), for the Zoom meeting link.

 

Professor Kate Thomas will give a seminar on how to get a job in liberal arts colleges. 

By definition, well-qualified job candidates come out of programs in research universities, but not all tenure track positions are in those familiar settings.  How can candidates best prepare themselves to win jobs at undergraduate liberal arts colleges?  It can be hard to know how to translate your experience for the smaller liberal arts setting, and even harder to know how liberal arts structures, cultures and values will shape the interview process. 

Kate Thomas is the K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College and was, for seven years, Chair of the English department   She has chaired multiple national searches in English and participated in many more across the humanities.  This workshop will give graduate students a realist and pragmatic guide to application materials, interviews and campus visits. 

Dr Thomas will cover topics such as: balancing emphases on teaching and research; assessing your audience; framing your specializations; navigating the call to be a “good fit”; making it easy for a search committee to hire you; recent changes in liberal arts education; challenges specific to liberal arts campuses; mistakes that can lose you the job.  

On Wednesday, April 29th, from 5-7pm, our very own Mursal Sidiqi will present their Work in Progress in the Faculty Lounge (FBH 135). In their own words, their dissertation "spans the eighteenth and nineteenth century to trace British technologies of national, racial, and gender formation as Britain first began to imagine the Afghan polity and the Afghan subject. Mursal’s work interweaves queer studies, empire studies, and translation studies to examine the entanglements of Afghan and British literary histories of sexuality." They will discuss a chapter titled “Staging the Afghan Beside the Horse (1811-1839).” The event is co-hosted by ResVic. 

 THE NOVEL AND LABOR WORKSHOP

May 1st, Kelly Writer’s House, room 202.

 

9.00-10.00 Novel & Labor on the Plantation 

 

Mariana Akawi (University of Pennsylvania) & Jack Fixa (UC Irvine) 

Comments & Chair: Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley) 

 

10.15-11.15 “A mouth, a milking-pail, and a threshing machine”: Reproductive Labors in the Novel 

 

Ronny Litvack-Katzman (Harvard) & Koyuki Smith (The Graduate Center, CUNY) 

Comments & Chair: Lilith Todd (University of Pennsylvania) 

 

11.15-11.45 Coffee Break 

 

11.45-12.45 Home Factories in the Novel 

 

Ashley Cullina (Yale) & Eileen Ying (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: David Kurnick (Rutgers) 

 

12.45-1.30 Lunch Break

 

1.30-2.30 Unusual Forms for the Novel & Labor 

 

Brandon Rushton (University of Notre Dame) & Ruoxi Zhu (University of Pennsylvania)

Comments & Chair: Arielle Zibrak (University of Wyoming)  

 

2.45.-3.45 Numbing & Sanitizing: Creative Labor & the Neoliberal Novel 

 

Yoojung Chun (Harvard) & Rachael Mulvihill (Carnegie Mellon University) 

Comments & Chair: Dora Zhang (UC Berkeley)  

 

  

5-7 PUBLIC PANEL:  THE NOVEL AND REPRODUCTIVE LABOR

May 1st, Fisher-Bennett Hall, room 401

See here for more details https://www.english.upenn.edu/events/2026/05/01/novel-and-labor-public-p...

Lilith Todd, "Mary Wollstonecraft's Weaning Forms." 

Dora Zhang, "Reproducing People: On Types and Stereotypes."

Arielle Zibrak, "The Destructive Imagination of the Eugenic Novel Heroine." 

DINNER FOR WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS AT 4506 Chester Ave.

 

 

Saturday, May 2nd 

Fisher Bennett Hall, Room 222

See here for more details https://www.english.upenn.edu/events/2026/05/02/novel-and-labor-day-2

10.00-11.00 Labor & the Novel in a State of Emergency 

Michael Williamson (Binghamton University) & Xavier Xin (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania)

 

11.15-12.00 Round Up (Tina Lupton, Chair)

 

 

 

 

10.00-11.00 Labor & the Novel in a State of Emergency 

Michael Williamson (Binghamton University) & Xavier Xin (University of Pennsylvania) 

Comments & Chair: Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania)

 

11.15-12.00 Round Up (Tina Lupton, Chair)

The Department of English invites you to toast the graduating English Majors and Minors of the University of Pennsylvania Class of 2026!

Champagne and light refreshments will be served!