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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Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives"
February 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Bidwell (The Morgan Library & Museum), "Printed Declarations: Life, Liberty, Editions, Issues, and States"
February 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), "Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades"
February 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics"
February 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich), "Kinship Diagrams and the Quest to Dematerialize Relatedness"
March 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tina Lupton (University of Pennsylvania), "When Writing Isn’t Work: Ronald Fraser, the New Left Review, and the 'Work' Essays (1964-9)"
March 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Joan Judge (York University), "Chinese Common Readers: Toward an Understanding of Vernacular Literacy" [ROSENBACH LECTURE]
March 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College), "Expelling European Jews? The Printing and Reprinting of a Renaissance Costume Book"
March 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Ivan Drpic (University of Pennsylvania), "Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church"
April 6, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Piet van Boxel (University of Oxford), "The Bookshelves of Robert Bellarmine: A Quest for the Authentic Text of Scripture"
April 13, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael C. Gamer (University of Pennsylvania) and Deven Parker (University of Glasgow), "Slow History on Stage (and Page): The Other Burney Collection"
April 20, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France / University of Pennsylvania), "Revolution and Erasure. France 1789"
April 27, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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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 -
David McKnight (Penn), “'Headquarters of the Avant-Garde': The Gotham Book Mart and the Making and Marketing of Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century”
March 11, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jeremy Dell (Dartmouth), “Dying for History: The Materiality of Ta'rikh in the Niger Bend”
February 25, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Shira Brisman (Penn), “How Light is Spent”
February 18, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Kate van Orden (Harvard), “Cutting Class: Music in Renaissance Schoolbooks”
February 11, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Maurice Samuels (Yale), “Sympathetic Ink: Reflections on the Writing Portfolio of the Duchesse de Berry”
February 4, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm