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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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