September 8: Text, Language, Object: The Utility of Textual Thinking in the Study of Archaeological Materials
Anne Tiballi (University of Pennsylvania)
Workshop in the History of Material Texts
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts is a weekly seminar with presentations by scholars on a wide variety of topics in book history, bibliography, manuscript studies, history of reading, publication and printing, and related topics.
Founded in 1993 by Professor Peter Stallybrass (English, emeritus) and the Penn Libraries, the Workshop in the History of Material Texts is a weekly seminar held in the library that features scholars presenting a wide variety of research in book history, bibliography, manuscript studies, history of reading, publication and printing, and related topics. Subjects range widely in chronology and in geography: from the ancient world to the modern and with a global scope. The usual format of the workshop is a presentation of approximately thirty minutes, followed by discussion. Talks are accompanied by PowerPoint presentations, handouts, or other visual materials. Materials from Penn's special collections are often displayed as part of the workshop.
All are welcome to attend. Participants, including faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, conservators, booksellers, and others, come from a wide range of disciplines.
Workshops
Fall 2025 Workshops
September 15: The Age of Choice Technology
Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania)
September 22: Between Libraries: The Maintenance of Early Modernity
Megan Heffernan (DePaul University)
September 29: “These thoughts were all in French, almost untranslatable”: The Bilingual Manuscript Notebooks of Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy
Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania)
October 6: Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution
Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (The Ohio State University)
October 13: Black Print as Prison Praxis
Tajah Ebram (Rutgers University)
October 20: The Many Lives of Renaissance Woodblocks: The Case of Ulisse Aldrovandi's Collection
Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library)
October 27: Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia
Josh Mugler (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library)
November 3: Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print
Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
November 10: Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths Around the Classics
Kate Meng Brassel (University of Pennsylvania)
November 17: Scribe 106: The Portfolio of a Florentine Humanistic Scribe
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania)
November 24: To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia
Sylvia W. Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College)
December 1: Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770
Emily Green (George Mason University)
Spring 2025 Workshops
January 27: “Περὶ Καρτερίας (Peri Karterias) — On Perseverance: Virtually Unwrapping the Herculaneum Scrolls”
W. Brent Seales (University of Kentucky)
February 3: Baconian Quacks and the Origins of Digital Media
Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania)
February 10: Material Literacies in Action: Documentary Practices in Northwestern Europe, 800–1250
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (New York University)
February 17: Joseph Chahin: A Syrian Maronite Merchant and the Recueil des historiens des croisades
James Wilson (University of Konstanz, Germany)
February 24: Books in Late Antiquity: Their Making, Their Depiction, and Their Interpretation
Georgios Boudalis (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Greece)
March 3: Shakespeare in the Kitchen: Culinary Metaphor, Cookbooks, and Recipe Recreation
Marissa Nicosia (Pennsylvania State University – Abington College)
March 17: Printers’ Waste: Fanny Hill and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
March 24-27: A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: “Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation"
Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University)
March 31: ‘Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts’: Pleasure, Play, and Populism in Early American Epigraphic Culture
Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania)
April 7: Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I.
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington)
April 14: Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter
Jana Dambrogio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
April 21: Roundtable: “Inscribing Indigeneity in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to the History of the Book”
Led by Glenda Goodman (University of Pennsylvania) and Rhae Lynn Barnes (Princeton University)
April 28: Enlightened Quipus: Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d’une Péruvienne and Eighteenth-century French Incas
Roger Chartier (Collège de France/University of Pennsylvania)
Fall 2024 Workshops
September 9: Engineered for Action: Movable Books in Early Nineteenth-Century Japan
Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge)
September 16: The Librarynth
Randall McLeod (University of Toronto)
September 23: What Did Muybridge and Darwin Have in Common? The Heliotype
Julie Melby (Princeton University)
September 30: Paper Predilections in Early Modern England
Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)
October 7: Storage: How Paper Does the Work of Paperwork
Craig Robertson (Northeastern University)
October 14: The End of Medieval Scribes
Lucie Doležalová, Jakub Kozák, Karel Pacovský, Ondřej Fúsik, Martin Roček (Charles University, Prague)
October 21: Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process
Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
October 28: Lost Literature in the Early Modern English Book Trade, 1557–1640: Poetry, Plays, and Prose Fiction
Alan Farmer (The Ohio State University)
November 4: Typographical Hallucinations
Lisa Gitelman (New York University)
November 11: 'The Need of a Bibliography’: Early Attempts at a Comprehensive List of American Books
Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin)
November 18: Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us
Simon Martin (Penn Museum)
November 25: Polished Nails and Polished Parchment: Nægel-seax, Scraping Knives, and the Perfection of Writing in Insular and Carolingian Manuscripts
Thomas Rainer (University of Zurich)
December 2: What Were the Ten Commandments Really Written On? A Catalogue of Ancient Levantine Material Texts
Tim Hogue (Penn)
Spring 2024 Workshops
January 22: Walt Whitman’s Inferno, Bryn Mawr College, and the American Civil War
David Wallace (Penn)
January 29: Is a Monument a Text?
Donovan Schaefer (Penn)
February 5: Correio d’África: A Case Study of Pan-Africanism in the Multilingual Black Press of the 1920s
Zita Nunes (Penn)
February 12: Some Poor Septenaries and their Rich Relations: The Vernon Pater Noster and the Sherborne Missal
Jessica Brantley (Yale)
February 19: The Atlantic Itinerary of Smollett’s Complete History of England
Emma Hart (Penn)
February 26: Toward a New Typology of Roman Writing Equipment
Joseph Howley (Columbia)
March 11-14: Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: Toward a History of Black Print
Elizabeth McHenry (NYU)
March 18: Erasable Writing Technologies, 1500-1800
Peter Stallybrass (Penn), Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Ray Schrire (Tel Aviv University)
March 25: The First American English Language Bibles: Fragments and Traces
Jim Green (Library Company of Philadelphia)
April 1: Hokusai’s Page Spread: A Filial Piety Book in Early Modern Japan
Ann Sherif (Oberlin)
April 8: It is Easy to Add Books: Library Catalogs in Seventeenth-century Oxford
Lila Goldenberg (Penn)
April 15: Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Rural North China, 17th-19th Centuries: The Liaozhai Collection at Keio University
Zhenzhen Lu (Bates)
April 22: Printed books in the Indigenous Languages of Latin America during the Colonial Period: an Approach from History, Editorial Studies, and Materiality
Marina Garona Gravier (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
April 29: Books as Portfolio
Roger Chartier (Penn)
Fall 2023 Workshops
September 11: Storage Plans in Medieval Egypt: Holes, Provisional Binding and Archival Bundling of Geniza Documents
Marina Rustow (Princeton)
September 18: Printing in Prison
Damon McCool (Eastern State Penitentiary)
September 25: Immigrant Voices on Paper: Representations of Religion, Race, and Home in the first Arabic Newspaper in America
Reyhan Durmaz (Penn)
October 2: Recording Speech in 17th-Century England
András Kiséry (CCNY)
October 9: Future Auditions: On Gramophonic Voice Letters and the Inscription of the Absent Other
Thomas Levin (Princeton)
October 16: Wartime Gifts: Contemporary Artists' Books from Sri Lanka
Sonal Khullar (Penn)
October 23: Twelfth Night in 2023: Editing Gender, Sex and Sexuality
Emma Smith (Oxford)
October 30: Postal Hackers
Christy Pottroff (Boston College)
November 6: The Plantation's Library
Neil Safier (Brown)
November 13: Representation and Reality: Works of Art as Material Evidence in the BASIRA Project [Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art]
Nicholas Herman (Penn) and Barbara Williams Ellertson (Independent Scholar)
November 20: The Butcher and the Book: Regulating Kosher Meat in Early Modern Europe
Joshua Teplitsky (Penn)
November 27: Blind Impressions and Mute Typography in The Faerie Queene (1590)
Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside)
December 4: First, Remove Screws: A Cultural History of the Repair Manual
Shannon Mattern (Penn)
Spring 2023 Workshops
Jan. 23: After Permanence: A Future History of Monuments
Paul Farber (Penn & Monument Lab)
Jan. 30: Festivities and Race-Making: Assessing The Visual and the Written Record
Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College)
Feb. 6: Preserved as a Relic': What Happened to Edwin Forrest’s Burned First Folio?
Zachary Lesser (Penn) and Whitney Trettien (Penn)
Feb. 6: Adalbert Stifter and Pantheon Illustrated Editions
Vance Byrd (Penn)
Feb. 6: Talking Back to the Philosophes: The Case of Claude-Rigobert Lefebvre de Beauvray
David Bell (Princeton)
Feb. 27: A Scripture-Centered Practice of Jewish Material Devotion in Medieval Spain and Its Cultural Setting
Talya Fishman (Penn)
March 13: Metaphors, Conjectures, and Opinions: Talking About Books in Early Modern Ottoman Texts
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn)
March 20: Folding the Lyric
Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado, Boulder)
March 27: Clown Images in and Beyond the Early Modern Playhouse
Tiffany Stern (Birmingham)
April 17: Reimagining Women's Roles in 19th-Century American Scientific Illustration
Jessica Linker (Northeastern)
April 24: Who Died on April 23? Three Textual Connected Histories between Peru, Spain and London
Roger Chartier (Penn)
Fall 2022 Workshops
Sep
12
- Lecture
- Workshop
Open to the Public
History of Material Texts: Making the First Black Comic Book
All-Negro Comics (1947) is generally regarded as the first comic book produced by and for African Americans. This talk aims to build on a growing scholarly literature around the history of race and comics by looking at the process by which All-Negro Comics might have made its way into the hands of readers.
- September 12, 2022
- 5:15pm - 7:00pm
- Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library and via Zoom
Sep
19
- Lecture
- Workshop
Open to the Public
History of Material Texts: Ideologies of the Codex in Richard Hakluyt and John Smith
Joseph Rezek (Boston University) speaks on the earliest Anglophone literature of colonization (1585-1624) and the relationship between ideologies of human variety and ideologies associated with print authorship.
- September 19, 2022
- 5:15pm - 7:00pm
- Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library and via Zoom
Sep
26
- Lecture
- Workshop
Open to the Public
History of Material Texts: W. G. Sebald's Papers and Photographs
Ulrich von Bülow (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach) will discuss the papers of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), preserved at the German Literary Archive in Marbach, Germany, and investigate the manuscripts for Sebald’s last great unfinished and unpublished book project.
- September 26, 2022
- 5:15pm - 7:00pm
- Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library and via Zoom
Oct. 3: Richard Benson and the End of Printed Pictures
Peter Barberie (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Oct. 10: Reading Medieval Parchment through an Eighteenth-Century Lens
Alexis Hagadorn (Columbia University Libraries)
Oct. 17: Phillis Wheatley Passes An Evening with Someone Else’s Husband
Tara Bynum (University of Iowa)
Oct. 24: Why Are Clocks?
Elly Truitt (Penn)
Oct. 31: Writing Commentaries on Non-existent Texts: The Mystery of Ismail Ankaravi’s Commentary on the 7th Volume of Rumi’s Masnavi
Jamal Elias (Penn)
Nov. 7: The Ten Commandments and/as Erasable Wax Tablets
Peter Stallybrass (Penn)
Nov. 14: Indigenous Epistemology and Early Modern Science: The Creation of 'De historia animalium Novae Hispaniae' (1571–1577) [Co-sponsored by the Penn Department of History]
Marcy Norton (Penn)
Nov. 21: Paper + Digital: No Longer Format Agnostic
Margaret McAleer (Library of Congress)
Nov. 28: Learning with the Tress Collection
Julie Davis (Penn)
Dec. 5: Finding Octavia E. Butler in the Archives and around Black Pasadena
Chi-ming Yang (Penn)
Spring 2022 Workshops
Jan
24
Open to the Public
Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University): "Making and Knowing in Early Modern How-To Texts"
An intriguing late sixteenth-century anonymous manuscript, Ms. Fr. 640, contains over 900 "recipes" for objects of art and of everyday use. This lecture will explore the meanings and conceptualization of making and materials in early modern how-to texts, and also introduce the digital edition of Ms. Fr. 640.
- Monday, January 24, 2022, 5:15pm, via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 7:15pm
- Zoom
Jan. 31: Failed Formats: Goethe’s Literary Anthology for the German People
Carlos Spoerhase (Bielefeld)
Feb
07
- Workshop
Dahye Kim (Northwestern University): "The Hangul Machines and the Curious Disappearance of Chinese Characters"
Drawing upon my book project that focuses on the mechanization and digitization of the modern Korean writing system, this talk focuses on the Cold War history of the hangul typewriter and keyboard.
- Monday, February 7, 2022, 5:15pm, via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Zoom
Feb
07
- Workshop
Aylin Malcolm (University of Pennsylvania): "Revolutionary Science: Movable Books and the Medieval Universe"
In this talk, I review a range of movable devices from the later Middle Ages, including their applications in cosmography, medicine, and the computation of the date of Easter.
- Monday, February 7, 2022, 5:15pm, via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Zoom
Feb
21
- Workshop
Meg Leja (Binghamton University): "Mending Bodies by (A)mending Texts: Medical Manuscripts from the Early Middle Ages"
This talk introduces the corpus of Latin medical writings extant in manuscripts from the late eighth century onward—a corpus that is far larger and more diverse than has previously been recognized.
- Monday, February 21, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Zoom
Feb
28
- Workshop
Marcy Dinius (DePaul University): "David Walker's Textual Engagements"
This talk will be centered on Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, the radical political pamphlet published by activist David Walker in three editions in Boston between 1829 and 1830.
- Monday, February 28, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Zoom
Mar
14 -
17
- Lecture
Open to the Public
The Secret Life of Books
In this three-part series, Peter D. McDonald addresses the challenge of uncovering, and then relating, the fugitive history of reading’s inwardness.
- March 14 - 17, 2022
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Mar
21
- Workshop
Sarah Werner: "Speculations on Feminist Bibliography"
How can we combine feminist theory and praxis with the study of material texts? Come to this workshop for a chance to push at our boundaries, real and imaginary, and to explore together what feminist bibliography might be.
- Monday, March 21, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Mar
28
- Workshop
Micha Perry (University of Haifa): "Medieval Jewish Bilingual Charters: Texts, Signs and Sounds"
In my presentation, I will be looking at a large group of bilingual medieval charters, texts composed in both Latin (or other European languages) and Hebrew (or other Jewish languages).
- Monday, March 28, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Apr
04
- Workshop
Roger Chartier (Penn): "The Skin of an Innocent Lamb: Jack Cade and the Roman Law"
This lecture seeks to examine lines of dialogue by Jack Cade in the Second Part of Henry the Sixth (quoted from Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio) and how they relate to popular medieval perception, rebellion, and political attitudes towards books and manuscripts.
- Monday, April 4, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Apr
11
- Workshop
Material Texts Roadshow: Women Collectors and Their Collections
A virtual roundtable featuring Lisa Baskin, Emiko Hastings, and Sarah Lindenbaum.
- Monday, April 11, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Apr
18
- Workshop
Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) and Amanda Licastro (Penn Libraries): "Book Traces: Library History and the Marks of Collaborative Reading"
This lecture introduces the Book Traces project, which supports the discovery, cataloguing, and preservation of pre-1923 library books that bear traces of the past: inscriptions, annotations, insertions, and other modifications made by historical readers.
- Monday, April 18, 2022, 5:15pm, in person and via Zoom
- 5:15pm - 6:15pm
- Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Apr. 25: Honoring Jerry Singerman: A Celebration of His Work as Humanities Editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts is supported by the School of Arts and Sciences through the Department of English and hosted by the Penn Libraries. The co-directors of the seminar are Professor Zachary Lesser (English), Jerry Singerman (Penn Press, emeritus), and John Pollack (Kislak Center, Penn Libraries).
Associated with the workshop is the book series in Material Texts published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, which includes many monographs that have emerged from presentations given at the workshop over the years.
If you would like to receive announcements about upcoming meetings, please sign up for our listserv using this link or visit the Workshop website. For more information, please contact Lila Goldenberg.