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
-
Shannon Mattern (Penn): "First, Remove Screws: A Cultural History of the Repair Manual"
December 4, 2023 - 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Past Events
-
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 -
Nancy Farriss (Penn): "Christianity, Alphabetic Writing, and Indigenous Intellectuals in 16th- and 17th-century Mexico"
November 18, 2019 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm