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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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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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 -
Joshua Kotin (Princeton): "The Shakespeare and Company Project"
September 16, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Bibliography in the Longue Durée
September 9, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (Virginia), “Annotation, Editing, and the Material Text: The Case of Alexander Pope and His Contemporaries”
April 22, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn), “The Book as Body, the Life as Editions: From Quevedo to Machado (de Asssis)”
April 15, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sarah Horowitz (Haverford), “Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Illustrators of the Wig and Powder School: British Gift Books of the 1890s”
April 8, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sharon Achinstein (Johns Hopkins), "John Milton in the Printing House (1644)"
April 1, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Matthew Brown (Iowa), “A Poetics of Colportage: Pamphlets and Chapbooks in Revolutionary-Era British America”
March 25, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Megan Robb (Penn), “Printing the Urdu Public: Madinah Newspaper, Muslims, and Urban Life in South Asia, 1900-1947”
March 18, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm