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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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 -
Vance Byrd (Penn): "Adalbert Stifter and Pantheon Illustrated Editions"
February 13, 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 -
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 -
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): "Metaphors, Conjectures, and Opinions: Talking About Books in Early Modern Ottoman Texts"
March 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado Boulder): "Folding the Lyric"
March 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tiffany Stern (Birmingham): "Clown Images in and Beyond the Early Modern Playhouse"
March 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers: Reading the Earliest Letterbooks of the U.S. Postmaster General (1789–1805) for the Extraordinary"
April 3, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 10, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 11, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jessica Linker (Northeastern): "Reimagining Women's Roles in 19th-Century American Scientific Illustration"
April 17, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "Who Died on April 23? Three Textual Connected Histories between Peru, Spain and London"
April 24, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Medals and Shells: On Morphology and History, Once Again"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 27, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Gods, Humans, Apes: Art History and Evolution"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 25, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Paleontology and Connoisseurship"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 24, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm -
Nicholas Herman (Penn), “The Book-Shaped Object in Renaissance Europe”
September 17, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Michael Suarez (Virginia), “‘A kind of printing:’ The Material Texts of Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand (1702, 1723)”
April 23, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn), “Who Is the Author? Translating Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century France and Spain: From Voltaire to Moratín”
April 16, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Lodovica Braida (L’Università degli Studi di Milano), “‘Dangerous Books’. Italian Epistolary Collections in the Sixteenth Century: Censorship and Self-Censorship”
April 9, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
André Dombrowski (Penn), “How Multimedial was the 19th Century? The Case of Photo-Sculpture”
April 2, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary, University of London), “The Limits of Book Technologies: The Messy Implementation of Novel Features in English Bibles, 1200-1600”
March 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sonia Hazard (Franklin & Marshall), “America’s Cargo Cult: How Joseph Smith Discovered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism”
March 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm