Department of English

Paleography is an affiliated working group. Affiliated working groups are coordinated and funded outside of the Department of English. 

The Penn Paleography Group is a student-run, cross-departmental group for those with enthusiasm for manuscripts and an interest in deciphering them. Group meetings provide an informal environment to increase our knowledge of premodern scripts and styles of handwriting, and to gain collaborative experience of reading their texts (viz. ‘learning-by-doing’/ aka ‘scriptly hands-on’ learning.)

Everyone is welcome—undergraduate and graduate students, scholars working in any field, with or without previous experience. Our hope is for folks to practice paleographical skills together, and simply have fun.

We look at materials from many periods (usually premodern), languages, and collections. This means we read a wide range of scripts, deciphering texts both on the screen and page, aided by resources in Penn's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. 

Participants are encouraged to nominate texts they want to work on, either for research or due to paleographical peculiarities. The group intends to rotate between different languages in accordance with the interests of attendees.

For further information please contact co-organizers:

Anne (Lantian) Jing (she/her): annejing@sas.upenn.edu

Julia Pelosi-Thorpe (she/her): peju@sas.upenn.edu