| 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!
September 14. Julie Nelson Davis (University of Pennsylvania), “Invention and Authenticity: Reproduction, Fabrication, and the Modern Market for Ukiyo-e Prints.” "In 1918, Frank Lloyd Wright was taken to see a cache of ukiyo-e prints in a secret location outside Tokyo. Believing that it was a collection of pristine impressions, he bought the lot. Soon he learned that he had been deceived: his dealer, Hayashi Kyūgo, had sold him worn, faded impressions that had their color reprinted in order to pass as originals. These “revamps” were traced to the studio of Takamizawa Enji, a renowned restorer as well as the era’s most capable fabricator. In this talk, I will place this episode within the larger frame of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reproduction practices, a time when the terms of authenticity were challenged by replication, refabrication, and reproduction. By tracing Takamizawa’s trajectory from suspected forger to his restitution as the producer of approved reproductions, this talk synthesizes the career of this master artisan within his period context. This case study further demonstrates that authenticity crises in ukiyo-e didn’t arise because reproduction broke the medium’s rules—rather, the problem became the ways in which shifting regimes of value framed the question of what was an “original print” within the modern market for ukiyo-e." Julie Nelson Davis is the Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of History of Art and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from Reed College, studied at Gakushūin University in Tokyo, and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Her research spans Japanese prints, illustrated books, and paintings from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (2007, 2021), Partners in Print (2014), and Picturing the Floating World (2021), Davis was also lead curator for the exhibition Arthur Tress and the Japanese Illustrated Book at Penn in 2022. A former President of the Japan Art History Forum and Editor-in-Chief of caa.reviews, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the Clark Art Institute, among others. She will be the inaugural Ishibashi Professor at the University of Zurich in fall 2026 and is also this year’s interim faculty director for the History of Material Text Workshop. This talk comes from her book-in-progress on imitation, homage, and fabrication in ukiyo-e.
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 2026 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Iris Péron-Ames (History of Art), ““Enshrining the Word: The Shrine of the Cathach”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (History of Art), "On the Edge of the Herbal: Knowledge, Images and Unmaking in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
