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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András Kiséry (CCNY): "Recording Speech in 17th-Century England"
October 2, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Gabrielle Foreman (Pennsylvania State University): "His Page Was Clay: How David Drake, an Enslaved Potter and Poet, Became a Museum Superstar"
October 9, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sonal Khullar (Penn): "Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka"
October 16, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Emma Smith (Oxford): "Twelfth Night in 2023: Editing Gender, Sex and Sexuality"
October 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers"
October 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Neil Safier (Brown): "The Plantation's Library"
November 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nicholas Herman (Penn) and Barbara Williams Ellertson (Independent Scholar): "Representation and Reality: Works of Art as Material Evidence in the BASIRA Project [Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art]”
November 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joshua Teplitsky (Penn): "The Butcher and the Book: Regulating Kosher Meat in Early Modern Europe"
November 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside): "Blind Impressions and Mute Typography in The Faerie Queene (1590)"
November 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Shannon Mattern (Penn): "Case Logics: A Catalog of Media Furnishings"
December 4, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Joseph Rezek (Boston University): "Ideologies of the Codex in Richard Hakluyt and John Smith"
September 19, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sean Quimby (Penn Libraries): "Making the First Black Comic Book"
September 12, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jerry Singerman retirement celebration
April 25, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) and Amanda Licastro (Penn Libraries): "Book Traces: Library History and the Marks of Collaborative Reading"
April 18, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Material Texts Roadshow (Virtual event): Lisa Baskin, Emiko Hastings (William L. Clements Library), Sarah Lindenbaum: "Women Collectors and Their Collections"
April 11, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Roger Chartier (Penn): "The Skin of an Innocent Lamb: Jack Cade and the Roman Law"
April 4, 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 -
Sarah Werner: "Practicing Feminist Bibliography"
March 21, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Marcy Dinius (DePaul University): "David Walker's Textual Engagements"
February 28, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Meg Leja (Binghamton): "Mending Bodies by (A)mending Texts: Medical Manuscripts from the Early Middle Ages"
February 21, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm