Department of English
Material Texts
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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András Kiséry (CCNY): "Recording Speech in 17th-Century England"
October 2, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Gabrielle Foreman (Pennsylvania State University): "His Page Was Clay: How David Drake, an Enslaved Potter and Poet, Became a Museum Superstar"
October 9, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sonal Khullar (Penn): "Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka"
October 16, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Emma Smith (Oxford): "Twelfth Night in 2023: Editing Gender, Sex and Sexuality"
October 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers"
October 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Neil Safier (Brown): "The Plantation's Library"
November 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nicholas Herman (Penn) and Barbara Williams Ellertson (Independent Scholar): "Representation and Reality: Works of Art as Material Evidence in the BASIRA Project [Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art]”
November 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joshua Teplitsky (Penn): "The Butcher and the Book: Regulating Kosher Meat in Early Modern Europe"
November 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside): "Blind Impressions and Mute Typography in The Faerie Queene (1590)"
November 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Shannon Mattern (Penn): "Case Logics: A Catalog of Media Furnishings"
December 4, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado Boulder): "Folding the Lyric"
March 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): "Metaphors, Conjectures, and Opinions: Talking About Books in Early Modern Ottoman Texts"
March 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Talya Fishman (Penn): "A Scripture-Centered Practice of Jewish Material Devotion in Medieval Spain and Its Cultural Setting”
February 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
David Bell (Princeton): "Talking Back to the Philosophes: The Case of Claude-Rigobert Lefebvre de Beauvray"
February 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Vance Byrd (Penn): "Adalbert Stifter and Pantheon Illustrated Editions"
February 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Zachary Lesser (Penn) and Whitney Trettien (Penn): "'Preserved as a Relic': What Happened to Edwin Forrest’s Burned First Folio?"
February 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College): "Festivities and Race-Making: Assessing The Visual and the Written Record"
January 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Paul Farber (Penn & Monument Lab): "After Permanence: A Future History of Monuments"
January 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Introducing "Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America": A Conversation with Dr. Tara A. Bynum
January 20, 2023 - 3:00pm to 4:30pm -
Chi-ming Yang (Penn): "Finding Octavia E. Butler in the Archives and around Black Pasadena"
December 5, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm