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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[WINNER OF THE STALLYBRASS PRIZE] Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (University of Pennsylvania), "The Natural and the Strange: Seeing and Making Plants in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
October 19, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISTINGUISHED LECTURE]: Dr. Andrew Shankman (Rutgers University–Camden)
October 26, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics, Arctic Ephemera"
November 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania), "Les Lettres françaises and the Legacy of Communist Film Criticism"
November 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zoë Cary-Beckett (University of Washington), "Paper Muscles vs. Black Power: Superhero Fantasies Confront the Aesthetics of Black Liberation in the 1970s"
November 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jessica Peterson, Erica Honson, Kathryn Reuter (University of Pennsylvania), "Remaking the Dunlap Broadside at the Semiquincentennial: A community-based exploration of Revolutionary-era document production"
November 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Linda Chance (University of Pennsylvania), "Poem Cards: The Triumph of the Material in Japanese Literature"
November 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Past Events
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Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center): "Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband”
October 17, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexis Hagadorn (Columbia University Libraries): "Reading Medieval Parchment through an Eighteenth-Century Lens"
October 10, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Barberie (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "Richard Benson and the End of Printed Pictures"
October 3, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ulrich von Bülow (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach): "W. G. Sebald's Papers and Photographs"
September 26, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joseph Rezek (Boston University): "Ideologies of the Codex in Richard Hakluyt and John Smith"
September 19, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sean Quimby (Penn Libraries): "Making the First Black Comic Book"
September 12, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jerry Singerman retirement celebration
April 25, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) and Amanda Licastro (Penn Libraries): "Book Traces: Library History and the Marks of Collaborative Reading"
April 18, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Material Texts Roadshow (Virtual event): Lisa Baskin, Emiko Hastings (William L. Clements Library), Sarah Lindenbaum: "Women Collectors and Their Collections"
April 11, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "The Skin of an Innocent Lamb: Jack Cade and the Roman Law"
April 4, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm