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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David McKnight (University of Pennsylvania), "Not Guilty: Frances Steloff vs. the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice"
October 12, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[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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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 -
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania, "Reconstructing French Kerouac: One Holograph Notebook at a Time"
November 23, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Thomas Ward, US Naval Academy, "Astrophil's Trembling Voice: Between the Pages of The Covntesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598)."
November 16, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm -
Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania, “Violence and the Archive: Richard of Bury’s Philobiblon"
November 9, 2015 - 5:15pm to 8:00pm