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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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
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Thomas D. Conlan (Princeton): "The Transmission of Omission: Understanding Japan’s 14th-15th Centuries Through Altered Histories"
November 30, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Material Texts Roadshow, “Writing on Objects”: feat. Chris Faraone (Chicago), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Jennifer Park (UNC-Greensboro), and Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Newberry Library)
November 23, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jesse R. Erickson (Delaware): "Cut, Paste, Curate: Print Culture and Bibliography for the Scrapbook"
November 16, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Simcha Gross (Penn): "“Whoever is hungry, come and eat”: On the Origins and Winding Reception of a Puzzling Passover Passage"
November 9, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Lara Cohen (Swarthmore): "Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergrounds"
November 2, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jessa Lingel (Penn): "'It's kind of fun because it's more stark': Web 1.0 nostalgia and craigslist's material form"
October 26, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton): "Towards a Black Book Aesthetic"
October 19, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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