Department of English

• Monday, March 31, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are especially thrilled and delighted to welcome Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled: “‘Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts’: Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture.” Peter Emanuel Diamond writes: From poems affixed to maypoles to Virgilian quotations inscribed in domestic doorways, early America was filled with epigraphs. For settlers who broke with the colonial authorities in power, the epigraph was a tool to transform public space into a contested site of warring words. Radical invocations of the epigraph were especially common among early American populists in the spheres of education and missionary work. My talk will focus on the writings of two such figures: Thomas Morton of New England and Francis Daniel Pastorius of Pennsylvania, both of whom saw mass alphabetic literacy as key to an egalitarian colonial society. I will consider the theological and political stakes of Morton’s and Pastorius’s obsessions with affixed and inscribed pieces of writing in colonial public space. I will also argue that epigraphic culture informed the literary innovations of these writers’ major written works, such as Morton’s inventive extracting and marginalia and Pastorius’s revolutionary commonplacing. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how early American debates about the when, where, and how of the written word became contests to determine the centers and margins of colonial society.  Peter Emanuel Diamond is a PhD candidate in English at University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation studies radical Protestant thinkers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America who imagined themselves as doubly exiled, both from Europe and from mainstream colonial life. In the Penn Libraries, Peter served as project manager of the Digital Beehive, where he oversaw the digital annotation of the longest section of Francis Daniel Pastorius’s thousand-page commonplace book. Last year, Peter held the Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and he currently serves as the Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts.