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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Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) "Printers' Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe's Book of Martyrs"
March 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 24, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 25, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University), A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography "Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
March 27, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) "'Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts': Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture"
March 31, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) "Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I."
April 7, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jana Dambrogio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter"
April 14, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roundtable "Inscribing Indigeneity in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to the History of the Book"
April 21, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France/University of Pennsylvania) "Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettre d'une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-century French Incas"
April 28, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Leah Price (Rutgers), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
April 10, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, April 11, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, April 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
[CANCELED] Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers: Reading the Earliest Letterbooks of the U.S. Postmaster General (1789–1805) for the Extraordinary"
April 3, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tiffany Stern (Birmingham): "Clown Images in and Beyond the Early Modern Playhouse"
March 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado Boulder): "Folding the Lyric"
March 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): "Metaphors, Conjectures, and Opinions: Talking About Books in Early Modern Ottoman Texts"
March 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Talya Fishman (Penn): "A Scripture-Centered Practice of Jewish Material Devotion in Medieval Spain and Its Cultural Setting”
February 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
David Bell (Princeton): "Talking Back to the Philosophes: The Case of Claude-Rigobert Lefebvre de Beauvray"
February 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Vance Byrd (Penn): "Adalbert Stifter and Pantheon Illustrated Editions"
February 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Zachary Lesser (Penn) and Whitney Trettien (Penn): "'Preserved as a Relic': What Happened to Edwin Forrest’s Burned First Folio?"
February 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College): "Festivities and Race-Making: Assessing The Visual and the Written Record"
January 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm