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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Reyhan Durmaz (Penn): "Immigrant Voices on Paper: Representations of Religion, Race, and Home in the first Arabic Newspaper in America"
September 25, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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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Dahye Kim (Northwestern University): "The Hangul Typewriter: Failing Communication and the Korean Writing System"
February 7, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Carlos Spoerhase (Bielefeld): "Failed Formats: Goethe’s Literary Anthology for the German People"
January 31, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Pamela H. Smith (Columbia): "Making and Knowing in Early Modern How-To Texts"
January 24, 2022 - 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 -
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 -
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 -
Sarah Wasserman (University of Delaware): "Pop-up Buildings and Postage Stamps: Ephemera and the American Novel"
November 15, 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 -
Elizabeth McHenry (NYU): "'Utterly Worthless'?: Race Publishing, Subscription Books and Black Communities"
November 1, 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, October 26, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, October 28, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm