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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David McKnight (University of Pennsylvania), "Not Guilty: Frances Steloff vs. the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice"
October 12, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[WINNER OF THE STALLYBRASS PRIZE] Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (University of Pennsylvania), "The Natural and the Strange: Seeing and Making Plants in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
October 19, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISTINGUISHED LECTURE]: Dr. Andrew Shankman (Rutgers University–Camden)
October 26, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics, Arctic Ephemera"
November 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania), "Les Lettres françaises and the Legacy of Communist Film Criticism"
November 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zoë Cary-Beckett (University of Washington), "Paper Muscles vs. Black Power: Superhero Fantasies Confront the Aesthetics of Black Liberation in the 1970s"
November 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jessica Peterson, Erica Honson, Kathryn Reuter (University of Pennsylvania), "Remaking the Dunlap Broadside at the Semiquincentennial: A community-based exploration of Revolutionary-era document production"
November 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Linda Chance (University of Pennsylvania), "Poem Cards: The Triumph of the Material in Japanese Literature"
November 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Past Events
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Neeraja Poddar (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "The Philadelphia Museum of Art's Gosainkund Painting: Visualizing the Routes and Sites of Pilgrimage in Nepal"
October 12, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Derrick Spires (Cornell): "Aliened American Women: Tracing Fanny Homewood and Pseudonymity in the Black Press"
October 5, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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