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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Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania), "‘Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics."
November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe."
November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."
November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Emily Green (George Mason University), "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."
December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Laura Helton (Delaware): "Access Restrictions and Secret Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Policing of Black Books"
September 28, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Autumn Womack (Princeton): "Reprinting the Past/Reordering Black Social Life"
September 21, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Claire Bourne (Penn State) and Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge): "Milton’s Hamlet"
September 14, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "The Persistence of the Ephemera. The Printed Word and the Non-Book Texts" --CANCELED
April 27, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Lara Cohen (Swarthmore): "Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergrounds" --CANCELED
April 20, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): "Sterne's Punctuation, Once Again: A Comparative Approach" --CANCELED
April 13, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Andrew Pettegree (St. Andrews) and Arthur der Weduwen (St. Andrews): "Materializing the Immaterial. Recovering the lost books of Early Modern Europe"--CANCELED
April 6, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Robert Darnton (Harvard): "Pirate publishing during the eighteenth century" --CANCELED
March 30, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Geoffrey Day: "Eighteenth-century waste paper and bibliography" CANCELED
March 23, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (UVA), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807" - CANCELED
March 16, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, March 17, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, March 18, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm

Department of English
