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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Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) "Printers' Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe's Book of Martyrs"
March 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
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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Hwisang Cho (History, Xavier University): “The Epistolary Brush: Letter Writing and Power in Early Modern Korea”
November 14, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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