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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Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague), “Inertia of Medieval Scribes”
October 14, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture), “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process”
October 21, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Alan Farmer (Ohio State University), “Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction”
October 28, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “Typographical Hallucinations”
November 4, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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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Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Joseph Howley (Columbia): "Enslaved labor and the ancient Roman book"
November 4, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
David Kazanjian
October 28, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Deidre Lynch (Harvard): "Charles Lamb’s Paperwork"
October 21, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Daniel Jütte (NYU): "Hammering out the Reformation? Luther’s 95 Theses as a Material Text"
October 14, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Liza Blake (Toronto): "Margaret Cavendish's Books and Some Alternate Histories of Textual Bibliography"
October 7, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Erin Schoneveld (Haverford): "Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde"
September 30, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jonathan Senchyne (Wisconsin)
September 23, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm