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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Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives"
February 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Bidwell (The Morgan Library & Museum), "Printed Declarations: Life, Liberty, Editions, Issues, and States"
February 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), "Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades"
February 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics"
February 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich), "Kinship Diagrams and the Quest to Dematerialize Relatedness"
March 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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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Eyal Poleg (Queen Mary, University of London), “The Limits of Book Technologies: The Messy Implementation of Novel Features in English Bibles, 1200-1600”
March 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Sonia Hazard (Franklin & Marshall), “America’s Cargo Cult: How Joseph Smith Discovered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism”
March 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn), “Whitman: Manuscript in Print”
March 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University), “‘Entered for his copy’: Creating Stationers’ Register Online”
February 26, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Alex Ponsen (Penn), “Visions of Global Empire in the Early Modern Iberian World”
February 19, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Wendy Wall (Northwestern), “What’s the Matter with Hester Pulter? Or, Salvation, Materiality, Poetics, and Cosmology in a 17th-Century Manuscript”
February 12, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Meredith McGill (Rutgers), “The Materiality of the Poem and the History of the Book”
February 5, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Juliet Fleming (NYU), “Of Grammatology as a Local Science”
January 29, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), “Making Sense of the Surviving Manuscript Depictions of Shakespeare’s Coat of Arms”
January 22, 2018 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Rachel Sagner Buurma (English, Swarthmore) and Laura Heffernan (English, University of North Florida): “The Materiality of Syllabi and the History of Literary Study”
December 11, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm