Welcome to the website for the University of Pennsylvania's Workshop in the History of Material Texts! Here you can find announcements about upcoming events as well as a searchable database of seminars we have held since the fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, please contact us.)

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We meet each Monday on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also live-stream our events via Zoom. For updates and Zoom links, please sign up for our listserv; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.

Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.

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Next Meeting

On October 21, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Dorothy Berry (National Museum of African American History and Culture) will present: “Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process.”

Debates around the role of digitized special collections and archives often end in metaphysical concern about losing the physical experience of holding an object. Digital access is convenient and potentially reaches a broader audience, but the affective response of touching the book someone owned, or rifling through the letters someone wrote is felt as quite different from scrolling on a computer. This talk considers these concerns in relation to one of the largest records of Black popular culture in the twentieth century: the Johnson Publishing Company Archive.

The Johnson Publishing Company Archive is a digital collection co-stewarded by the Getty Research Institute and the National Museum of African American History and Culture and will be shared with the public on a digital first access model. The project, still in process, provides an object lesson in the complications of digitization, material texts, and different kinds of access.

Dorothy Berry currently serves as the Digital Curator for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her scholarly work focuses on the broad definitions of and access to Black archives and collections. Working as an archivist and digital special collections expert, she has led projects to more ethically describe and make discoverable archival collections. She received Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers” award, as well as the Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader and Council Exemplary Service Awards from the Society of American Archivists. Her writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Public Domain Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, as well as with academic publishers.

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The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts, 2024

The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be awarded annually to the two best essays by students in any school at Penn—one by an undergraduate, one by a graduate student—on any aspect of how texts take material form and circulate in the world. Our field covers texts of all kinds, from printed books, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets, to e-readers, websites, hard disks, and server farms; from illuminations, woodcuts, and engravings, to GIFs and TIFFs; from title pages, flyleaf advertisements, and dealer catalogues, to listservs and email signatures. We are interested in printing and publishing histories, authorship, reception, piracy, censorship, and all themes related to the networks through which these texts circulate.

The Prize honors Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of English, who founded Penn's Workshop in the History of Material Texts in 1993. The seminar has been meeting every Monday evening since then, at 5:15 in the Kislak Center, Van Pelt Library. It has been one of the most influential institutions in the field and has led to numerous similar workshops around the world.

Like the Workshop itself, we encourage work that brings together the technical, material, and cultural aspects of texts. Essays will be judged by the directors of the Workshop and members of its Advisory Board, listed on the About page.

Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!

Undergraduate Category:

Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”

Graduate Category:

Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”

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Recordings of Past Talks

See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.