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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Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print."
November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania), "‘Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics."
November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe."
November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."
November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Emily Green (George Mason University), "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."
December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague), “Inertia of Medieval Scribes”
October 14, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Craig Robertson (Northeastern University), “Storage: How Paper Does the Work of Paperwork”
October 7, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), "Paper Predilections in Early Modern England"
September 30, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Julie Mellby (Princeton University), “What Did Muybridge and Darwin Have in Common? The Heliotype”
September 23, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Randall McLeod (University of Toronto), “The Librarynth”
September 16, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge), "Engineered for Action: Movable Books in Early Nineteenth-Century Japan"
September 9, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): “Books as Portfolio”
April 29, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marina Garona Gravier (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México): "Printed Books in the Indigenous Languages of Latin America During the Colonial Period: An Approach from History, Editorial Studies, and Materiality”
April 22, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zhenzhen Lu (Bates): “Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Rural North China, 17th-19th Centuries: The Liaozhai Collection at Keio University”
April 15, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Lila Rice Goldenberg (Penn): "It is Easy to Add Books: Library Catalogs in Seventeenth-century Oxford"
April 8, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Department of English
