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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Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague), “Inertia of Medieval Scribes”
October 14, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture), “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process”
October 21, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Alan Farmer (Ohio State University), “Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction”
October 28, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “Typographical Hallucinations”
November 4, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin), “‘The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books”
November 11, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Martin (Penn Museum), “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us”
November 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Thomas Rainer (University of Zurich), “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts”
November 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tim Hogue (University of Pennsylvania), “What Were the Ten Commandments Really Written On? A Catalogue of Ancient Levantine Material Texts”
December 2, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Roger Chartier (Penn), “Who Is the Author? Translating Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century France and Spain: From Voltaire to Moratín”
April 16, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Lodovica Braida (L’Università degli Studi di Milano), “‘Dangerous Books’. Italian Epistolary Collections in the Sixteenth Century: Censorship and Self-Censorship”
April 9, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
André Dombrowski (Penn), “How Multimedial was the 19th Century? The Case of Photo-Sculpture”
April 2, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary, University of London), “The Limits of Book Technologies: The Messy Implementation of Novel Features in English Bibles, 1200-1600”
March 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sonia Hazard (Franklin & Marshall), “America’s Cargo Cult: How Joseph Smith Discovered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism”
March 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn), “Whitman: Manuscript in Print”
March 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University), “‘Entered for his copy’: Creating Stationers’ Register Online”
February 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Alex Ponsen (Penn), “Visions of Global Empire in the Early Modern Iberian World”
February 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Wendy Wall (Northwestern), “What’s the Matter with Hester Pulter? Or, Salvation, Materiality, Poetics, and Cosmology in a 17th-Century Manuscript”
February 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Meredith McGill (Rutgers), “The Materiality of the Poem and the History of the Book”
February 5, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm