| 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; 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.
On April 7, 2025 at 5:15, Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington) will present: “Characters, Epistolary Novels, and the Analog History of A.I.”
Whether exuberant or doomsaying, the polemics surrounding AI share an interest in representing it as breaking with, rather than exhibiting continuities with, the past. Yet AI’s rootedness in preexisting technologies defines its impacts as much as its newness. These preexisting technologies include not only recent advances in mass digitization and machine learning but analog developments going back centuries and even millennia. The reality is that AI is inhabited by the technologies of the predigital era, which continue to shape online experiences. Among these are two technologies that emerged within early print; namely, characters, understood as both textual figurations of humans and letterforms streamlined through typecasting. My talk explores both and their interrelation, partly in the phenomenon of printed letters that offer experiences of unmediated contact with the human via the translation of scribal into typographic writing. The hope is to offer more nuanced historical context for understanding the impacts of the digital today. Geoffrey Turnovsky is Professor of French and co-director of the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington, overseeing the graduate certificate in Textual and Digital Studies and the minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. He is the author of The Literary Market. Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 2024).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 4, 2025, through this form.
Eligibility:
1) For undergraduates: essays must have been written in Spring 2024, Fall 2024, or Spring 2025 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: Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor, History of Art; Julie Nelson Davis, Professor, History of Art; Deven M. Patel, Associate Professor, South Asia Studies; Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor, English
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”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
