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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Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives"
February 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Bidwell (The Morgan Library & Museum), "Printed Declarations: Life, Liberty, Editions, Issues, and States"
February 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), "Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades"
February 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics"
February 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich), "Kinship Diagrams and the Quest to Dematerialize Relatedness"
March 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tina Lupton (University of Pennsylvania), "When Writing Isn’t Work: Ronald Fraser, the New Left Review, and the 'Work' Essays (1964-9)"
March 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Joan Judge (York University), "Chinese Common Readers: Toward an Understanding of Vernacular Literacy" [ROSENBACH LECTURE]
March 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College), "Expelling European Jews? The Printing and Reprinting of a Renaissance Costume Book"
March 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Ivan Drpic (University of Pennsylvania), "Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church"
April 6, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Piet van Boxel (University of Oxford), "The Bookshelves of Robert Bellarmine: A Quest for the Authentic Text of Scripture"
April 13, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael C. Gamer (University of Pennsylvania) and Deven Parker (University of Glasgow), "Slow History on Stage (and Page): The Other Burney Collection"
April 20, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France / University of Pennsylvania), "Revolution and Erasure. France 1789"
April 27, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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David Scott Kastan (English, Yale): “The Complete Works of Shakespeare? How Complete Should They Be?”
October 3, 2016 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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