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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Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “Typographical Hallucinations”
November 4, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin), “‘The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books”
November 11, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Martin (Penn Museum), “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us”
November 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Thomas Rainer (University of Zurich), “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts”
November 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tim Hogue (University of Pennsylvania), “What Were the Ten Commandments Really Written On? A Catalogue of Ancient Levantine Material Texts”
December 2, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Steve Dolph (Spanish & Portuguese, Penn): “Divergent Arcadias: Madrid, 1605"
November 7, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Rachel Hall (Math, St. Joseph's University): "What is an Oblong Tunebook?"
October 31, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joe Rezek (English, Boston University / LCP): “The Lost Sermon of David Margrett (1775), Black Moses”
October 24, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Bibliography and Culture: The Story of the Pavier Quartos with Zack Lesser
October 19, 2016 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm -
Shane Butler (Classics, Johns Hopkins): “Dante’s Mask”
October 17, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Marina Rustow (Near Eastern Studies, Princeton): “The Cairo Geniza and the Lost Medieval Arabic Archive”
October 10, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
David Scott Kastan (English, Yale): “The Complete Works of Shakespeare? How Complete Should They Be?”
October 3, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Renata Holod (History of Art, Penn): “On the Biography of One Manuscript: A 12th c. Qur'an Copy in the Penn Museum Collections”
September 26, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jared Richman (English, Colorado College): “The Other King’s Speech: Elocution and the Politics of Disability in Georgian Britain”
September 19, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Lawrence Nees (Art History, University of Delaware): "Reading and Seeing: The Beginnings of Book Illumination and the Modern Discourse on Ethnicity"
Co-sponsored by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript StudiesSeptember 12, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm