Department of English

• Monday, March 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

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

We are thrilled to welcome Christina Lupton ( University of Pennsylvania), for a talk titled “When Writing Isn’t Work: Ronald Fraser, the New Left Review, and the ‘Work’ Essays (1964-9).”

Prof. Lupton writes:

"This talk focuses on a series of essays written in the late 1960s by different kinds of workers – including several employed in the print shop and news industries. The essays appeared first in the New Left Review under the editorship of Ronald Fraser, an important figure in the masthead of the socialist journal. Before the series had finished its journal run, it appeared in 1969 as a Penguin collection, with an afterword by Raymond Williams. In this essay, Williams celebrates a culture of people talking openly and equitably about the jobs they do, signaling this as a feature of the new cultural materialism. In this talk, I want to confirm and showcase the originality of these written pieces while pressing further on the question of their own materiality. The people writing them weren’t writers by trade: they were print setters, bus drivers, journalists, miners, warehouse guards, croupiers. So how did they come to write and publish these extraordinary pieces of writing? What can the gap between working and writing about work reveal about the materiality of writing?"

Christina Lupton is a visitor this year at the Penn English Department. She has been a Professor of English and Comparative literature at the Universities of Michigan, Notre Dame, Warwick, and Copenhagen. She takes up a position as the Bewley Chair of English at Rutgers University, Department of English this September. Her publications include Knowing Books: the Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (UPenn, 2011) and Reading and the Making of Time (Johns Hopkins, 2018). This talk draws on her new book project, When Writing Wasn’t Work, 1750-2025.