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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James Wilson (University of Konstanz, Germany) "Joseph Chahin: A Syrian Maronite Merchant and the Recueil des historiens des croisades"
February 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Georgios Boudalis (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Greece) "Books in Late Antiquity: Their Making, Their Depiction, and Their Interpretation"
February 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marissa Nicosia (Pennsylvania State University – Abington College) "Shakespeare in the Kitchen: Culinary Metaphor, Cookbooks, and Recipe Recreation"
March 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
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 - 5:15pm 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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Daniel Balderston, University of Pittsburgh
"Borges in Love"April 11, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
Alan Niles, University of Pennsylvania
"Memorial Culture in the Seventeenth-Century English Family Album"April 4, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
Nick Wilding, Georgia State University, "Forging the Moon; Or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo"
March 28, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
Lindsay Van Tine, University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College
"Charting the Tracks of Columbus: Washington Irving and the Territories of New World History"March 21, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
The RESTful Book: Bibliography and Bookish Media
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 17, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
The Poetics of Macintosh: Recovering the Digital Poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and William Dickey
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 15, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
The Transformissions of the Archive: Literary Remainders in the Late Age of Print
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 14, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
Panel featuring Anthony Grafton, Richard Calis, Frederic Clark, Madeline McMahon, and Jenny Rampling, moderated by Ann Blair, "Passing the Book"
February 29, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Liliane Weissberg, "'Wish you were hier': Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin Write Postcards"
February 22, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University, "'They Say That They Are Doing Right': Reading and Translating the Qur'an in 17th-century Florence"
February 15, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm