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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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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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 -
John Pollack (Penn) and Peter Stallybrass (Penn), “The Cannibal in the Hammock”
January 28, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Arthur Kiron (Penn), “Hidden in Plain Sight: Christian Readers of Rabbinic Literature in the Colonial Americas”
December 10, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Mitch Fraas (Penn), “Boilerplate: Documentation, Paperwork, and the Persistence of Form across the Early Modern and Modern Worlds”
December 3, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Gary Dyer (Cleveland State): “John Hunt's Lord Byron"
November 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Samantha Sommers (Ohio State), “Reading in Books: Reading Materially in William Wells Brown’s Clotel"
November 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
David Norbrook (Oxford), “‘But a copie’: Lucy Hutchinson’s Life in her Texts”
November 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Department of English
