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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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 -
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 -
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 -
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
Past Events
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Neeraja Poddar (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "The Philadelphia Museum of Art's Gosainkund Painting: Visualizing the Routes and Sites of Pilgrimage in Nepal"
October 12, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Derrick Spires (Cornell): "Aliened American Women: Tracing Fanny Homewood and Pseudonymity in the Black Press"
October 5, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Laura Helton (Delaware): "Access Restrictions and Secret Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Policing of Black Books"
September 28, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Autumn Womack (Princeton): "Reprinting the Past/Reordering Black Social Life"
September 21, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Claire Bourne (Penn State) and Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge): "Milton’s Hamlet"
September 14, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "The Persistence of the Ephemera. The Printed Word and the Non-Book Texts" --CANCELED
April 27, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Lara Cohen (Swarthmore): "Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergrounds" --CANCELED
April 20, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): "Sterne's Punctuation, Once Again: A Comparative Approach" --CANCELED
April 13, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Andrew Pettegree (St. Andrews) and Arthur der Weduwen (St. Andrews): "Materializing the Immaterial. Recovering the lost books of Early Modern Europe"--CANCELED
April 6, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Robert Darnton (Harvard): "Pirate publishing during the eighteenth century" --CANCELED
March 30, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm