Department of English
Material Texts
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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András Kiséry (CCNY): "Recording Speech in 17th-Century England"
October 2, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Gabrielle Foreman (Pennsylvania State University): "His Page Was Clay: How David Drake, an Enslaved Potter and Poet, Became a Museum Superstar"
October 9, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Sonal Khullar (Penn): "Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka"
October 16, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Emma Smith (Oxford): "Twelfth Night in 2023: Editing Gender, Sex and Sexuality"
October 23, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers"
October 30, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Neil Safier (Brown): "The Plantation's Library"
November 6, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nicholas Herman (Penn) and Barbara Williams Ellertson (Independent Scholar): "Representation and Reality: Works of Art as Material Evidence in the BASIRA Project [Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art]”
November 13, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Joshua Teplitsky (Penn): "The Butcher and the Book: Regulating Kosher Meat in Early Modern Europe"
November 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside): "Blind Impressions and Mute Typography in The Faerie Queene (1590)"
November 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Shannon Mattern (Penn): "Case Logics: A Catalog of Media Furnishings"
December 4, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
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Michael Suarez (UVA), Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: "Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807" - CANCELED
March 16, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, March 17, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm, March 18, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Deidre Lynch (Harvard): "Charles Lambs' Paperwork"
March 2, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Nancy Vickers (Bryn Mawr): "The Problem of ‘Seeing’: When Secondary Becomes Primary"
February 24, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
John Anderies (William Way LGBT Community Center): "On Developing an Exhibition on the Technologies of (Queer) Porn"
February 17, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Aaron Pratt (UT-Austin): "Yes, Playbook Readers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England Cared About Authorship"
February 10, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Paul Cobb (Penn): "The Book of Contemplation: The curious case of a photostat, a medievalist, and the history of Arabic printing in the US"
February 3, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
James Voelkel (Science History Institute): "The Elliptical Argument of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609): The New Astronomy as a Material Text"
January 27, 2020 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Kathryn James (Yale): "Imperfect: Bibliography, Natural History, and the Problem of Incomplete Knowledge"
December 9, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Johanna Drucker (UCLA): "Alphabet Historiography: Bibliography and Modes of Knowledge Transmission"
December 2, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm -
Philip Mogen (Penn): "Recycling and Remaking Tudor and Early Stuart tracts during the British Civil Wars"
November 25, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm