Department of English
Material Texts
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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Ada Kuskowski (Penn): "Foundational Legal Documents in an Era of Customary Law: Thinking about the Middle Ages"
September 20, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christina Lupton (University of Copenhagen): "Corona Time: Reading Fiction During the Covid-19 Pandemic"
September 27, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Margaret M. Bruchac (Penn): "Reading the Material and Textual Histories in a Path Wampum Belt"
October 4, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Teresa A. Goddu (Vanderbilt University): "Antislavery Media"
October 11, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Brenton Sullivan (Colgate University): "Buddhist Monastic Constitutions"
October 18, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (Rare Book School and University of Virginia): Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807"
October 25, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (Rare Book School and University of Virginia): Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807"
October 26, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Michael Suarez (Rare Book School and University of Virginia): Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807"
October 28, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Elizabeth McHenry (NYU): "'Utterly Worthless'?: Race Publishing, Subscription Books and Black Communities"
November 1, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Asheesh Kapur Siddique (UMass Amherst): "Documenting the Body of State: Paper and the Matter of the US Constitution"
November 8, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sarah Wasserman (University of Delaware): "Pop-up Buildings and Postage Stamps: Ephemera and the American Novel"
November 15, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Material Texts Roadshow (Virtual event): Brian Cassidy (Type Punch Matrix), Michelle Warren (Dartmouth College), Jessica Linker (Northeastern University): "Copy Technologies"
November 22, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) & Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews): "Materializing the Immaterial: Recovering the Lost Books of Early Modern Europe"
November 29, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University): "Unstable Access to the Print Record: The Case of Back Number Budd and Nineteenth-Century Newspapers"
December 6, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jerry Singerman retirement celebration
January 24, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Dahye Kim (Northwestern University): "The Hangul Typewriter: Failing Communication and the Korean Writing System"
February 7, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Pamela Smith (Columbia University): "Making and Knowing in Early Modern How-To Texts"
February 14, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Marcy Dinius (DePaul University): "David Walker's Textual Engagements"
February 28, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Micha Perry (University of Haifa): "Medieval Jewish Bilingual Charters: Texts, Signs and Sounds"
March 28, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Kathryn James (Yale): "Imperfect: Bibliography, Natural History, and the Problem of Incomplete Knowledge"
December 9, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Johanna Drucker (UCLA): "Alphabet Historiography: Bibliography and Modes of Knowledge Transmission"
December 2, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Philip Mogen (Penn): "Recycling and Remaking Tudor and Early Stuart tracts during the British Civil Wars"
November 25, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Nancy Farriss (Penn): "Christianity, Alphabetic Writing, and Indigenous Intellectuals in 16th- and 17th-century Mexico"
November 18, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography - Monday Tuesday Thursday
"Form and Style in the Transmission of Arabic and Greek Science and Philosophy to the Latin West"November 11, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 12, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm, November 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Joseph Howley (Columbia): "Enslaved labor and the ancient Roman book"
November 4, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
David Kazanjian
October 28, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Deidre Lynch (Harvard): "Charles Lamb’s Paperwork"
October 21, 2019 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm