| 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 27. Roger Chartier (Collège de France/ University of Pennsylvania), “Revolution and Erasure. France 1789.” "This presentation will be a contribution to the 2026 Revolutionary Spring Term at Penn, along with the exhibition organized by Lynne Farrington and John Pollack, The Time to Right all Wrongs: France, Haiti and Philadelphia in a Revolutionary Age, and the recent conference The Revolutionary Age: France, Haiti, and America. Its topic and title were inspired by the recent acquisition by our Library of a small book, printed at the end of the year 1789: La Cocarde Citoyenne. Etrenne, Dédié à la Nation, published by Jubert, Doreur Rue St Jacques in Paris. This small booklet brought together, in the same binding, three elements: a narrative of the events that occurred between July and October 1789 (with twenty-five pages devoted to July 14 and the taking of the Bastille), fifty erasable pages allowing one to write, to erase and to write again, and a calendar for 1790. This modest book allows us to link two histories: the history often presented in our Material Text Seminar of erasable writing (made possible on English writing tables, Spanish librillos de memoria or French tablettes) and the history of the erasure of the ancien régime made spectacular by the demolition of the Bastille as it is described and interpreted in numerous pamphlets published in 1789, all sharing the same trope of the despotic fortress already erased even before its actual destruction." Roger Chartier s Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His more recent books are Um mundo sem livros e sem livrarias? , São Paulo, Letraviva, 2020; Editer et traduire. Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Gallimard et Le Seuil, Collection Hautes Etudes, 2021; Won in Translation. Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe, tr. John H. Pollack, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; Cartes et fictions (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Editions du Collège de France, 2022, and L’histoire en mutation. Lectures , Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2024.
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.
