| 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 13. James Brophy (University of Delaware), “Printing Political Dissent: German Publishers in the Age of Revolutions.” "Marketing political dissent in Central Europe was no easy matter. Working within and around rigorous censorship regimes from the late Enlightenment into the 1850s, German publishers brought an array of print matter to market that critiqued, satirized, and denounced the social contract of late absolutism. Drawing on a long legacy of circulating forbidden print, publishers and authors transformed the nineteenth-century public sphere through market segmentation and a variety of print wares that amplified oppositional voices for both reform and revolution, yet democratic radicalism never achieved a breakthrough in mainstream readership. While liberalism gradually attained the status of permissible dissent, the print circuits and material formats of republicanism remained marginalized and inaccessible to common readers. Based upon my 2024 study, this presentation weighs the achievements and setbacks of German publishers, whose commercial drive and innovative maneuvers contested enduring governmental resistance to a free press." James M. Brophy is the Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he teaches modern European history. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century public sphere and censorship. Recent publications include Print Markets and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870 (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (Jan Thorbecke, 2023), co-edited with Bärbel Holtz and Gabriele Clemens.
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.
