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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Randall McLeod (University of Toronto), “The Librarynth”
September 16, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Julie Mellby (Princeton University), “What Did Muybridge and Darwin Have in Common? The Heliotype”
September 23, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), “Paper Predilections in Early Modern England”
September 30, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Craig Robertson (Northeastern University), “Storage: How Paper Does the Work of Paperwork”
October 7, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague), “The End of Medieval Scribes”
October 14, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture), “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process”
October 21, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Alan Farmer (Ohio State University), “Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction”
October 28, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “Typographical Hallucinations”
November 4, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin), “‘The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books”
November 11, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Martin (Penn Museum), “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us”
November 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Thomas Rainer (University of Zurich), “Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts”
November 25, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tim Hogue (University of Pennsylvania), “What Were the Ten Commandments Really Written On? A Catalogue of Ancient Levantine Material Texts”
December 2, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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Margaret M. Bruchac (Penn): "Reading the Material and Textual Histories in a Path Wampum Belt"
October 4, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christina Lupton (University of Copenhagen): "Corona Time: Reading Fiction During the Covid-19 Pandemic"
September 27, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Ada Kuskowski (Penn): "Foundational Legal Documents in an Era of Customary Law: Thinking about the Middle Ages"
September 20, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jack Lynch (Rutgers University-Newark): "Real Fakes and Fake Fakes: Materiality in Literary Forgery"
September 13, 2021 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Priya Joshi (Temple): " A Book History of the Novel"
December 7, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Thomas D. Conlan (Princeton): "The Transmission of Omission: Understanding Japan’s 14th-15th Centuries Through Altered Histories"
November 30, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Material Texts Roadshow, “Writing on Objects”: feat. Chris Faraone (Chicago), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Jennifer Park (UNC-Greensboro), and Suzanne Karr Schmidt (Newberry Library)
November 23, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Jesse R. Erickson (Delaware): "Cut, Paste, Curate: Print Culture and Bibliography for the Scrapbook"
November 16, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Simcha Gross (Penn): "“Whoever is hungry, come and eat”: On the Origins and Winding Reception of a Puzzling Passover Passage"
November 9, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Lara Cohen (Swarthmore): "Paschal Beverly Randolph's Occult Undergrounds"
November 2, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm