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
-
Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania), "'These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable': The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy."
September 29, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University), "Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."
October 6, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tajah Ebram (Rutgers University), "Black Print as Prison Praxis."
October 13, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library), "The Many Lives of Renaissance Woodblocks: The Case of Ulisse Aldrovandi's Collection."
October 20, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Josh Mugler (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), "Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia."
October 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print."
November 3, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania), "‘Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics."
November 10, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania), "Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe."
November 17, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."
November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Emily Green (George Mason University), "Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770."
December 1, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
-
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 -
Paul Farber (Penn & Monument Lab): "After Permanence: A Future History of Monuments"
January 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Introducing "Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America": A Conversation with Dr. Tara A. Bynum
January 20, 2023 - 3:00pm to 4:30pm -
Chi-ming Yang (Penn): "Finding Octavia E. Butler in the Archives and around Black Pasadena"
December 5, 2022 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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