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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Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania), "'These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable': The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy."
September 29, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University), "Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."
October 6, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tajah Ebram (Rutgers University), "Black Print as Prison Praxis."
October 13, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Many Lives of Renaissance Woodblocks: The Case of Ulisse Aldrovandi's Collection."
October 20, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Josh Mugler (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), "Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia."
October 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print."
November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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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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 -
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 -
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 -
Deidre Lynch (Harvard): "Charles Lambs' Paperwork"
March 2, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nancy Vickers (Bryn Mawr): "The Problem of ‘Seeing’: When Secondary Becomes Primary"
February 24, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
John Anderies (William Way LGBT Community Center): "On Developing an Exhibition on the Technologies of (Queer) Porn"
February 17, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Aaron Pratt (UT-Austin): "Yes, Playbook Readers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England Cared About Authorship"
February 10, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm