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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James Wilson (University of Konstanz, Germany) "Joseph Chahin: A Syrian Maronite Merchant and the Recueil des historiens des croisades"
February 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Georgios Boudalis (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Greece) "Books in Late Antiquity: Their Making, Their Depiction, and Their Interpretation"
February 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Marissa Nicosia (Pennsylvania State University – Abington College) "Shakespeare in the Kitchen: Culinary Metaphor, Cookbooks, and Recipe Recreation"
March 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
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 - 5:15pm 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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Julie Davis (Penn): "Learning with the Tress Collection"
November 28, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Margaret McAleer (Library of Congress): "Paper + Digital: No Longer Format Agnostic"
November 21, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Marcy Norton (Penn): "Indigenous Epistemology and Early Modern Science: The Creation of 'De historia animalium Novae Hispaniae' (1571–1577)"
November 14, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Stallybrass (Penn): "The Ten Commandments and/as Erasable Wax Tablets"
November 7, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jamal Elias (Penn): "Writing Commentaries on Non-existent Texts: The Mystery of Ismail Ankaravi’s Commentary on the 7th Volume of Rumi’s Masnavi"
October 31, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Elly Truitt (Penn): "Why Are Clocks?"
October 24, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center): "Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband”
October 17, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Alexis Hagadorn (Columbia University Libraries): "Reading Medieval Parchment through an Eighteenth-Century Lens"
October 10, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Peter Barberie (Philadelphia Museum of Art): "Richard Benson and the End of Printed Pictures"
October 3, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ulrich von Bülow (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach): "W. G. Sebald's Papers and Photographs"
September 26, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm