| 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 21. Nicole Rousmaniere (Deputy Director General, MOA Museum of Art, and Professor Emerita, University of East Anglia), "From Page to Exhibition: Creating Art of Manga.” “Manga as a Japanese visual narrative art form has grown over the last 100 years to become a global phenomenon. Initially referring to comics and graphic novels, manga has expanded beyond its original hand-drawn forms to include a variety of expressions, including digital forms, art, fashion, and new media, and as a result has an immense international reach. Manga’s superpower is its ability to immerse a reader in a story to experience the characters’ emotions deeply. Readers become so engaged with the characters and their stories that many leave comments on social media and send letters to the artists; these notes are monitored by the publishing companies and artists and influence future manga content. Manga is read by people of all ages globally. It is also big business: the turnover of the Japanese manga industry alone in 2025 was approximately 4.63 billion dollars. The Art of Manga exhibition is the first large-scale manga exhibition of original drawings (genga) and storyboards (nemu) from different artists and multiple publishers to be held in the USA. The Art of Manga exhibition, which originated in the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, will be shown in the Brooklyn Museum from Oct 3 to March 8, 2027. This talk explores the creation of this exhibition, challenges involved in bringing together artists, publishers, and original artworks, and what the process reveals about manga as a distinctive and increasingly global art form.” Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere is Deputy Director of the MOA Museum of Art and Professor emeritus of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia. She completed her doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1998. After teaching Japanese art history at the University of East Anglia and helping form the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Rousmaniere served as its first Director from 1999. Her major publications include Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Modern Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and the English translation of Tsuji Nobuo’s History of Art in Japan (A History of Art in Japan, Tokyo University Press, 2018). Until 2019, she worked as a curator in the Japanese section of the Asia Department at the British Museum, where she served as lead curator for the 2007 exhibition Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan and the 2019 Citi Exhibition Manga. She was responsible for the planning and curation of The Art of Manga exhibition held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco from September 2025 to February 2026, now traveling to the Brooklyn Museum from October to March. More information on the exhibition is available here
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: Julie Nelson Davis (2026-27) ; Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English (on leave, 2026-27); John Pollack, Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center
Advisory Board: Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies; 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.
