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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Tom Mullaney (Stanford University), "There’s No Such Thing as 'Continuity': On Studying Information in a Universe that Falls Apart"
October 7, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
David McKnight (University of Pennsylvania), "Not Guilty: Frances Steloff vs. the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice"
October 12, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[WINNER OF THE STALLYBRASS PRIZE] Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (University of Pennsylvania), "The Natural and the Strange: Seeing and Making Plants in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
October 19, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
[BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DISTINGUISHED LECTURE]: Dr. Andrew Shankman (Rutgers University–Camden)
October 26, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), "Polar Erratics, Arctic Ephemera"
November 2, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Julia Alekseyeva (University of Pennsylvania), "Les Lettres françaises and the Legacy of Communist Film Criticism"
November 9, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Zoë Cary-Beckett (University of Washington), "Paper Muscles vs. Black Power: Superhero Fantasies Confront the Aesthetics of Black Liberation in the 1970s"
November 16, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Jessica Peterson, Erica Honson, Kathryn Reuter (University of Pennsylvania), "Remaking the Dunlap Broadside at the Semiquincentennial: A community-based exploration of Revolutionary-era document production"
November 23, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm -
Linda Chance (University of Pennsylvania), "Poem Cards: The Triumph of the Material in Japanese Literature"
November 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Past Events
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[CANCELED] Christy Pottroff (Boston College): "Postal Hackers: Reading the Earliest Letterbooks of the U.S. Postmaster General (1789–1805) for the Extraordinary"
April 3, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Tiffany Stern (Birmingham): "Clown Images in and Beyond the Early Modern Playhouse"
March 27, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado Boulder): "Folding the Lyric"
March 20, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm -
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