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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The RESTful Book: Bibliography and Bookish Media
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 17, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
The Poetics of Macintosh: Recovering the Digital Poetry of Kamau Brathwaite and William Dickey
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 15, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
The Transformissions of the Archive: Literary Remainders in the Late Age of Print
A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in BibliographyMarch 14, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm -
Panel featuring Anthony Grafton, Richard Calis, Frederic Clark, Madeline McMahon, and Jenny Rampling, moderated by Ann Blair, "Passing the Book"
February 29, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Liliane Weissberg, "'Wish you were hier': Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin Write Postcards"
February 22, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Pier Mattia Tommasino, Columbia University, "'They Say That They Are Doing Right': Reading and Translating the Qur'an in 17th-century Florence"
February 15, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Lisa Gitelman, New York University, "Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale"
February 8, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Kathy Peiss, "Book Purges and Restitution in the U.S. Occupation of Postwar Germany"
February 1, 2016 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Jenny Adams, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "Unlocking St. Frideswide's Chest: Medieval Student Loans and the Value of Books."
December 7, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Carlos Spoerhase, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, "Burn Before Reading: On the Inevitability of Posthumous Papers in Modern Literature (Goethe, Dilthey, Kafka)"
November 30, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm