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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.

Image of Saint Jerome translating the Bible
Colored woodcut of Saint Jerome translating the Bible, from Septem diui Hieronymi epistole ad vitam mortaliu[m] instituendam accomodatissime (Leipzig, 1508) [Rare Book Collection LatC H5328 508s]

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 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
Front cover of All Negro Comics, 1947
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
Title page, John Smith, Generall HIstorie of Virginia (London 1624)
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
Photographs for W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. © DLA Marbach

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

Oct 15

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
  • 6:11pm - 6:11pm
  • Zoom
Imitation coral.

Jan. 31: Failed Formats: Goethe’s Literary Anthology for the German People
Carlos Spoerhase (Bielefeld)

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
Title page of Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, third edition (Boston: 1830).
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
Collage from William Kentridge’s 2nd Hand Reading project (2014), using the 1936 revised Oxford English Dictionary, Kentridge Studio
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
Image of a pink fist with "FEMINIST" spelled out on knuckles stamped over the title page of Fredson Bowers' Principles of Bibliographic Description (1949).
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 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
Stacked books with old covers.

 

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.