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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[WINNER OF THE STALLYBRASS PRIZE] Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (University of Pennsylvania), "The Natural and the Strange: Seeing and Making Plants in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
October 19, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISTINGUISHED LECTURE]: Dr. Andrew Shankman (Rutgers University–Camden)
October 26, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics, Arctic Ephemera"
November 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania), "Les Lettres françaises and the Legacy of Communist Film Criticism"
November 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zoë Cary-Beckett (University of Washington), "Paper Muscles vs. Black Power: Superhero Fantasies Confront the Aesthetics of Black Liberation in the 1970s"
November 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jessica Peterson, Erica Honson, Kathryn Reuter (University of Pennsylvania), "Remaking the Dunlap Broadside at the Semiquincentennial: A community-based exploration of Revolutionary-era document production"
November 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Linda Chance (University of Pennsylvania), "Poem Cards: The Triumph of the Material in Japanese Literature"
November 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Past Events
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Alejandro Ribeiro
March 13, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Georgianna Ziegler (Folger), "Greatness in Small Things: the Miniature Books of Esther Inglis"
February 27, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Rita Copeland, "An Emotional Anthology of Style: Glasgow Hunterian MS V.8.14."
February 20, 2017 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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