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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Peter Stallybrass, TBA
November 2, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Jerry Singerman, University of Pennsylvania Press, "Scholarly Publishing at the Crossroads: or, How Do We Move Forward Without Getting Run Over?"
October 26, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Alice Austin, Library Company of Philadelphia and Alice Austin Books, “Exploring Medieval Structures: Methods for a Book Artist”
October 19, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, "’Delightful to the Senses’: Color Woodblock Printing in Early Modern China”
October 12, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Ulrich von Bülow, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, "The Handiwork of Thinking – On the „Nachlass” of Martin Heidegger"
October 5, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Richard Kagan, Johns Hopkins University, “El Greco: Pictor Doctus or Artist-Philosopher?”
September 28, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Eva Mroczek, "Shapes of Scriptures: Native 'Book Histories' and the Non-Biblical Library of Early Judaism"
September 21, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Joan DeJean, University of Pennsylvania, “When Women Ruled Fashion: How Material Are Material Texts?”
September 14, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Laura Aydelotte
April 27, 2015 - 5:15pm to 6:15pm -
Ray Clemens
April 20, 2015 - 5:15pm to 6:15pm