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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Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 24, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 25, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 27, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) "'Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts': Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture"
March 31, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) "Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I."
April 7, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jana Dambrogio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter"
April 14, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roundtable "Inscribing Indigeneity in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to the History of the Book"
April 21, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France/University of Pennsylvania) "Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettre d'une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-century French Incas"
April 28, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Roger Chartier (Penn): “Books as Portfolio”
April 29, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marina Garona Gravier (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México): "Printed Books in the Indigenous Languages of Latin America During the Colonial Period: An Approach from History, Editorial Studies, and Materiality”
April 22, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zhenzhen Lu (Bates): “Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Rural North China, 17th-19th Centuries: The Liaozhai Collection at Keio University”
April 15, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Lila Rice Goldenberg (Penn): "It is Easy to Add Books: Library Catalogs in Seventeenth-century Oxford"
April 8, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Ann Sherif (Oberlin): "Hokusai’s Page Spread: A Filial Piety Book in Early Modern Japan”
April 1, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jim Green (Library Company): "The First American English Language Bibles: Fragments and Traces"
March 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn), Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Ray Schrire (Tel Aviv University): "Erasable Writing Technologies, 1500-1800"
March 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Elizabeth McHenry (NYU), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: "Toward a History of Black Print"
March 11, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Joseph Howley (Columbia): "Toward a New Typology of Roman Writing Equipment"
February 26, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Emma Hart (Penn): "The Atlantic Itinerary of Smollett’s Complete History of England"
February 19, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm