| 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 6. Ivan Drpić (University of Pennsylvania), “Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church.” "Byzantine fresco-painters rarely marked their works with personal inscriptions. One notable exception to this pervasive anonymity is the Church of the Virgin Peribleptos in Ohrid, North Macedonia. The mural decoration of this church, completed in 1294/95, features at least eight written marks left by the painters, the chief among whom were members of the Astrapas family from Thessaloniki. What is striking about these written marks is not only their sheer number—an idiosyncrasy otherwise unparalleled elsewhere in the Byzantine world—but also, more crucially, their strategic placement. Fully integrated into the painted scenes and figures, the “signatures” of the Astrapades take on the guise of epigraphic parerga gracing a variety of objects represented on the walls—garments, weaponry, tableware, and architecture. Rather than being external appendages to the frescoes, these written marks are, in other words, an integral part of their pictorial fiction. This lecture argues that the ostensible furtiveness of the painters’ personal inscriptions at the Peribleptos invited the beholder to participate in a game of visual hide-and-seek. In the process, it created conditions for an alternative mode of viewing, one in which the subject matter of the murals could be downplayed or even ignored at the expense of its artful rendition. As though refusing to exhaust itself in the task of depicting sacred truths, the art of the Astrapades proclaimed itself to be a source of visual pleasure." Ivan Drpić is the Cecil L. Striker Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium and its Slavic neighbors in Southeastern Europe. Drpić’s first book, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016)—the winner of the 2017 Runciman Prize and the 2019 Karen Gould Prize—explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium, focusing on the evidence of verse inscriptions. Drpić is currently at work on a second book project, The Enkolpion: Object and Self in Medieval Byzantium, which investigates the dynamics of subject formation through the lens of material culture. His scholarship has received recognition from a number of sources, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
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.
