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
-
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (New York University), "Material Literacies in Action: Documentary Practices in Northwestern Europe, 800–1250"
February 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
James Wilson (University of Konstanz, Germany) "Joseph Chahin: A Syrian Maronite Merchant and the Recueil des historiens des croisades"
February 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Georgios Boudalis (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Greece) "Books in Late Antiquity: Their Making, Their Depiction, and Their Interpretation"
February 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marissa Nicosia (Pennsylvania State University – Abington College) "Shakespeare in the Kitchen: Culinary Metaphor, Cookbooks, and Recipe Recreation"
March 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) "Printers' Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe's Book of Martyrs"
March 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 24, 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 -
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) "Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I."
April 7, 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 -
Roundtable "Inscribing Indigeneity in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to the History of the Book"
April 21, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
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
Past Events
-
Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania) "Baconian Quacks and the Origins of Digital Media"
February 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
W. Brent Seales “On Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls”
January 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Tim Hogue (University of Pennsylvania), “What Were the Ten Commandments Really Written On? A Catalogue of Ancient Levantine Material Texts”
December 2, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Thomas Rainer (University of Zurich), “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts”
November 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Martin (Penn Museum), “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us”
November 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin), “‘The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books”
November 11, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “Typographical Hallucinations”
November 4, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Alan Farmer (Ohio State University), “Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction”
October 28, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture), “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process”
October 21, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague), “Inertia of Medieval Scribes”
October 14, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm