| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
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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.)
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. (If you are outside the US, please email us to get on the list, as this link only works for those within the US.) Please see our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years. Thank you for your support and attendance!
January 26. Adrian Johns (University of Chicago), “Looking for Labels: The Science of Safety and the Defenders of Information.” In early twentieth-century Chicago, a group of electrical engineers devised a new venture to help citizens navigate the chaos of industrial society. They called it Label Service. The idea was that they would subject goods to scientific tests for safety, and award each one that passed a material text – a label – certifying as much. It proved a spectacular and lasting success. The labels were soon being mass-produced in enormous quantities – exceeding 20 million per year by about 1920, and 20 billion per year a century later. They became the lynchpin of a comprehensive enterprise of surveillance and discipline that undergirded the integrity of goods, first across America’s economy and then the world’s. The implicit trust that we all place in the things that we buy and use every day, which is so characteristic of modern life, rests on this largely unacknowledged enterprise. But labels themselves proved troublingly insecure: they could be misread, misapplied, even outright counterfeited. Sustaining them became a major operation in its own right. And this operation had consequences. It helped launch an “information defense industry” that today promises to sustain social trust amid an environment of digital deepfakery, reinventing to this end both the label and its surveillance regime. Recognizing the problems that Label Service posed – problems at once social, political, and epistemic – may help us face up to the compromises that this new industry demands. Adrian Johns is Maclear Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Originally educated at Cambridge, he taught at Caltech and UCSD before arriving in Chicago in 2001. He is the author of The Nature of the Book (1998), Piracy (2009), Death of a Pirate (2010), and The Science of Reading (2023), as well as co-editor of Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (2024). He is currently working on a history of the policing of information since the Middle Ages.
The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts is 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. And 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. Further information about the seminar, and a link to sign up for our listserv, can be found throughout this website. All are welcome to attend. 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 below. In order to be considered, submissions must be received by April 6, 2026, through this form.
Eligibility:
1) For undergraduates: essays must have been written in Spring 2025, Fall 2025, or Spring 2026 semesters; entrants must be currently enrolled at Penn.
2) For graduate students: essays must be unpublished work.
Co-Directors: Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English; John Pollack, Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center; Jerome Singerman, Senior Humanities Editor Emeritus, Penn Press
Advisory Board: Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies; Julie Nelson Davis, Professor, History of Art; Jim Duffin, Assistant University Archivist; Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor, English
Congratulations to our Spring 2025 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Norah Rami (English), “Theory of the Gothic Author”
Graduate Category:
Co-Winner: Koyna Tomar (History and Sociology of Science), “Visualizing Leprosy: Materiality and Expertise in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography”
Co-Winner: Hallie Nell Swanson (Religious Studies), “Manuscript as Picture-Pavilion: Workshop Production and Dakhni Romance”See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
