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 Norbrook (Oxford), “‘But a copie’: Lucy Hutchinson’s Life in her Texts”
November 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Margo Natalie Crawford (Penn), “The Textual Production of a Shared Black Edge”
November 5, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sarah Guérin (Penn), “On Ivory, Wax, and Paint: New Insights on Devotional Booklets”
October 29, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Katie Chenoweth (Princeton), “Printers’ Devices, or, How French Got Its Accents”
October 22, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
J.M. Duffin (Penn), “Draining the Swamp of Arcane Legal Text: Reclaiming the Geography of Eighteenth Century Philadelphia”
October 15, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Yale), “Unread: A History of the Book in Colonial South Asia”
October 8, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Whitney Trettien (Penn), “Edward Benlowes’ Queer Books: Experiments in Digital Book History”
October 1, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Medals and Shells: On Morphology and History, Once Again"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 27, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Gods, Humans, Apes: Art History and Evolution"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 25, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm -
Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), "Paleontology and Connoisseurship"
The 2018 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Fossils, Apes, Humans: A Chapter in the History of Science, RevisitedSeptember 24, 2018 - 5:30pm to 6:30pm