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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Tajah Ebram (Rutgers University), "Black Print as Prison Praxis."
October 13, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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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Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University), "Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."
October 6, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania), "'These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable': The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy."
September 29, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Megan Heffernan (DePaul University), ""Between Libraries: The Maintenance of Early Modernity."
September 22, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania), "The Age of Choice Technology."
September 15, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Anne Tiballi (University of Pennsylvania), "Text, Language, Object: The Utility of Textual Thinking in the Study of Archaeological Materials."
September 8, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France/University of Pennsylvania) "Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettre d'une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-century French Incas"
April 28, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roundtable "Inscribing Indigeneity in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to the History of the Book"
April 21, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jana Dambrogio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter"
April 14, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) "Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I."
April 7, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) "'Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts': Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture"
March 31, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm