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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András Kiséry (CCNY): "Recording Speech in 17th-Century England"
October 2, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Gabrielle Foreman (Pennsylvania State University): "His Page Was Clay: How David Drake, an Enslaved Potter and Poet, Became a Museum Superstar"
October 9, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sonal Khullar (Penn): "Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka"
October 16, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Emma Smith (Oxford): "Twelfth Night in 2023: Editing Gender, Sex and Sexuality"
October 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers"
October 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Neil Safier (Brown): "The Plantation's Library"
November 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nicholas Herman (Penn) and Barbara Williams Ellertson (Independent Scholar): "Representation and Reality: Works of Art as Material Evidence in the BASIRA Project [Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art]”
November 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joshua Teplitsky (Penn): "The Butcher and the Book: Regulating Kosher Meat in Early Modern Europe"
November 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside): "Blind Impressions and Mute Typography in The Faerie Queene (1590)"
November 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Shannon Mattern (Penn): "Case Logics: A Catalog of Media Furnishings"
December 4, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Julie Davis (Penn): "Learning with the Tress Collection"
November 28, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Margaret McAleer (Library of Congress): "Paper + Digital: No Longer Format Agnostic"
November 21, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Marcy Norton (Penn): "Indigenous Epistemology and Early Modern Science: The Creation of 'De historia animalium Novae Hispaniae' (1571–1577)"
November 14, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn): "The Ten Commandments and/as Erasable Wax Tablets"
November 7, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jamal Elias (Penn): "Writing Commentaries on Non-existent Texts: The Mystery of Ismail Ankaravi’s Commentary on the 7th Volume of Rumi’s Masnavi"
October 31, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Elly Truitt (Penn): "Why Are Clocks?"
October 24, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center): "Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband”
October 17, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexis Hagadorn (Columbia University Libraries): "Reading Medieval Parchment through an Eighteenth-Century Lens"
October 10, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Barberie (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "Richard Benson and the End of Printed Pictures"
October 3, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ulrich von Bülow (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach): "W. G. Sebald's Papers and Photographs"
September 26, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm