Department of English
Material Texts
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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Vance Byrd (Penn): "Adalbert Stifter and Pantheon Illustrated Editions"
February 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
David Bell (Princeton): "Talking Back to the Philosophes: The Case of Claude-Rigobert Lefebvre de Beauvray"
February 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Talya Fishman (Penn): "A Scripture-Centered Practice of Jewish Material Devotion in Medieval Spain and Its Cultural Setting”
February 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): "Metaphors, Conjectures, and Opinions: Talking About Books in Early Modern Ottoman Texts"
March 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado Boulder): "Folding the Lyric"
March 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tiffany Stern (Birmingham): "Clown Images in and Beyond the Early Modern Playhouse"
March 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers: Reading the Earliest Letterbooks of the U.S. Postmaster General (1789–1805) for the Extraordinary"
April 3, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 10, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 11, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jessica Linker (Northeastern): "Reimagining Women's Roles in 19th-Century American Scientific Illustration"
April 17, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "Who Died on April 23? Three Textual Connected Histories between Peru, Spain and London"
April 24, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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The Poetics of Macintosh: Recovering the Digital Poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and William Dickey
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 15, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
The Transformissions of the Archive: Literary Remainders in the Late Age of Print
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 14, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
Panel featuring Anthony Grafton, Richard Calis, Frederic Clark, Madeline McMahon, and Jenny Rampling, moderated by Ann Blair, "Passing the Book"
February 29, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Liliane Weissberg, "'Wish you were hier': Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin Write Postcards"
February 22, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University, "'They Say That They Are Doing Right': Reading and Translating the Qur'an in 17th-century Florence"
February 15, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Lisa Gitelman, New York University, "Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale"
February 8, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Kathy Peiss, "Book Purges and Restitution in the U.S. Occupation of Postwar Germany"
February 1, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Jenny Adams, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "Unlocking St. Frideswide's Chest: Medieval Student Loans and the Value of Books."
December 7, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Carlos Spoerhase, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, "Burn Before Reading: On the Inevitability of Posthumous Papers in Modern Literature (Goethe, Dilthey, Kafka)"
November 30, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania, "Reconstructing French Kerouac: One Holograph Notebook at a Time"
November 23, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm