| 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 Workshop began in January, 1993. (Information about talks from 1993–1995, before email records, is more thin, often limited only to speaker and date. We are very grateful to Carolyn Jacobson, who provided that information from her contemporary paper notes. If you have further information about titles or abstracts for these talks, 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!
April 20. Michael C. Gamer (University of Pennsylvania) and Deven Parker (University of Glasgow), “Slow History on Stage (and Page): The Other Burney Collection.” "Though less well known than his brother, novelist Frances Burney, and his father Charles Burney, the celebrated music theorist and historian, Charles Burney, Jr. lives on today in the collection of print ephemera he amassed—most famously British newspapers, but also works of literature and playbills. Now housed in the British Library, his collections are among the largest in existence; yet, they also have generally been regarded as the fruits of failed projects: his plans for editions of scholarly correspondence and for a comprehensive history of the British stage never realized despite the troves of documents he assembled for them. In this presentation, we view his collections not as the accumulated materials of unrealized works, but rather as experiments in bookmaking and in chronicling one’s own time through the codex. Unlike other theatrical histories of the stage, Burney compiled his as a temporal chronicle of mixed media, combining playbills, newspaper cuttings, theatrical prints, music scores, programmes, and other theatrical ephemera to create a slowed-down, incremental history of the stage. The volumes he created eschew the conventional categories of theatrical histories and green room accounts, rejecting theatre, region, actor, or anecdote as organizing rubrics. Burney instead presents the theatrical scene in weekly – and sometimes even daily – cross-sections, so that theatres and actors appear either in dialogue with one another or responding en masse to whatever topical event might at that moment seize public imagination. This slow history allows for the tracking of people and dramatic forms across geographies and between stages. The picture of theatre history that emerges is one of co-creation, competition, and dialogue. Burney imagines history as an interactive project, and like the book itself, perpetually in the state of being re-cut, re-made, and re-organized." Michael Gamer is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond his two monographs – Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge UP, 2000) and Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2017), he has published widely on Romantic-period theatre, including the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (with Jeffrey Cox; Broadview Press, 2003); A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire (with Diego Saglia; Bloomsbury, 2021); and essays in The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (Cambridge UP, 2018), The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830 (University of Michigan Press, 2023), Theatre Survey, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and other journals. Deven Parker is Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Glasgow, where she is carrying out research on Romantic authorship and dramatic copyright. Her first monograph, Romantic Media and Wartime Networks, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her essays have appeared in SEL 1500-1900, Studies in Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Umanistica Digitale, and elsewhere. With Michael Gamer, she is currently completing The Romantic Playbill for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series, and a performance database of English melodrama, provisionally titled Romantic Melodrama , to be housed at the University of Glasgow.
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.
