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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John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), "Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades"
February 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics"
February 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Simon Teuscher (University of Zurich), "Kinship Diagrams and the Quest to Dematerialize Relatedness"
March 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Tina Lupton (University of Pennsylvania), "When Writing Isn’t Work: Ronald Fraser, the New Left Review, and the 'Work' Essays (1964-9)"
March 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Joan Judge (York University), "Chinese Common Readers: Toward an Understanding of Vernacular Literacy" [ROSENBACH LECTURE]
March 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) and Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College), "Expelling European Jews? The Printing and Reprinting of a Renaissance Costume Book"
March 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Ivan Drpic (University of Pennsylvania), "Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church"
April 6, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Piet van Boxel (University of Oxford), "The Bookshelves of Robert Bellarmine: A Quest for the Authentic Text of Scripture"
April 13, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Michael C. Gamer (University of Pennsylvania) and Deven Parker (University of Glasgow), "Slow History on Stage (and Page): The Other Burney Collection"
April 20, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Roger Chartier (Collège de France / University of Pennsylvania), "Revolution and Erasure. France 1789"
April 27, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Past Events
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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 -
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