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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Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 24, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 25, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 27, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) "'Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts': Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture"
March 31, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) "Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I."
April 7, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jana Dambrogio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter"
April 14, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
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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James Voelkel (Science History Institute): "The Elliptical Argument of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609): The New Astronomy as a Material Text"
January 27, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Kathryn James (Yale): "Imperfect: Bibliography, Natural History, and the Problem of Incomplete Knowledge"
December 9, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Johanna Drucker (UCLA): "Alphabet Historiography: Bibliography and Modes of Knowledge Transmission"
December 2, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Philip Mogen (Penn): "Recycling and Remaking Tudor and Early Stuart tracts during the British Civil Wars"
November 25, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Nancy Farriss (Penn): "Christianity, Alphabetic Writing, and Indigenous Intellectuals in 16th- and 17th-century Mexico"
November 18, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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