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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Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania), "‘Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics."
November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe."
November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."
November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Emily Green (George Mason University), "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."
December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Larry Silver (History of Art, Penn): “Size Matters: Big City Prints of the Early Modern Period”
October 30, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Joseph Farrell (Classical Studies, Penn): “Ancient and Modern Materialities”
October 23, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Anuradha Mathur (Landscape Architecture, Penn) and Dilip da Cunha (Graduate School of Design, Harvard): “Designing the Place of Water”
October 16, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
David Stern (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Harvard): “The Topography of the Talmud Page”
October 9, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Mary Channen Caldwell (Music, Penn): "Inscribing Performance: Cueing Repetition in Medieval Song"
October 2, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marissa Nicosia (English, Penn State-Abington): "'Chronicled at home': Perkin Warbeck and the Popularity of English History Plays"
September 25, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Lynne Farrington (Penn): "A Very Good Book Indeed: Selling Bibles by Subscription in Nineteenth-Century America"
September 18, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jeffrey Kallberg (Music, Penn): “Chopin’s Chaise longue: Sociability and Homosocial Exchange”
September 11, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (Virginia), "The Museum Florentinum (1731ff) and the Material Texts of Antiquity"
April 24, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier, "Sganarelle's Wages"
April 17, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm