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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Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania), "'These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable': The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy."
September 29, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University), "Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."
October 6, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tajah Ebram (Rutgers University), "Black Print as Prison Praxis."
October 13, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Many Lives of Renaissance Woodblocks: The Case of Ulisse Aldrovandi's Collection."
October 20, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Josh Mugler (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), "Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia."
October 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print."
November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
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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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 -
Michael Suarez, University of Virginia/Rare Book School, "William Hamilton's Cabinet and Its Afterlives"
April 25, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
Roger Chartier, University of Pennsylvania, "When Shakespeare Met Cervantes"
April 18, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:45pm -
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