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
-
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
-
Michael Witmore (Folger)
Departmental Lecture SeriesFebruary 13, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Hannah Marcus (Harvard): “Censoring Medicine: Processes of Expurgation, Forgetting, and Remembering in Early Modern Italy”
February 6, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Workshop in the History of Material Texts: “The Needham Calculator”
January 30, 2017 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Mara Mills (NYU): “Words Per Minute: How Blind Readers Sped Up Broadcasting”
January 23, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
Ralph Rosen (Classics, Penn): “Books and Textual Practice in Galen’s Newly Recovered Treatise, On Avoiding Distress”
December 12, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Julie Nelson Davis (History of Art, Penn) and Alessandro Bianchi (Smithsonian Institute): “Presenting the Pulverer Collection of Japanese Illustrated Books in the Digital Era"
December 5, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak (History, NYU): “Printed Matter in the Pre-Modern West (7th-13th century)”
November 28, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Glenda Goodman (Music, Penn): “Copying Music: The Politics of Amateur Music-Making in 18th-Century America”
November 21, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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