| 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 March 31, 2025 at 5:15, Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) will present: “‘Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts’: Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture.”
From poems affixed to maypoles to Virgilian quotations inscribed in domestic doorways, early America was filled with epigraphs. For settlers who broke with the colonial authorities in power, the epigraph was a tool to transform public space into a contested site of warring words. Radical invocations of the epigraph were especially common among early American populists in the spheres of education and missionary work. My talk will focus on the writings of two such figures: Thomas Morton of New England and Francis Daniel Pastorius of Pennsylvania, both of whom saw mass alphabetic literacy as key to an egalitarian colonial society. I will consider the theological and political stakes of Morton’s and Pastorius’s obsessions with affixed and inscribed pieces of writing in colonial public space. I will also argue that epigraphic culture informed the literary innovations of these writers’ major written works, such as Morton’s inventive extracting and marginalia and Pastorius’s revolutionary commonplacing. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how early American debates about the when, where, and how of the written word became contests to determine the centers and margins of colonial society. Peter Emanuel Diamond is a PhD candidate in English at University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation studies radical Protestant thinkers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America who imagined themselves as doubly exiled, both from Europe and from mainstream colonial life. In the Penn Libraries, Peter served as project manager of the Digital Beehive, where he oversaw the digital annotation of the longest section of Francis Daniel Pastorius’s thousand-page commonplace book. Last year, Peter held the Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and he currently serves as the Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts.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.
