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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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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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 -
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