| 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 fall of 1996. (Information about speakers and talks from the initial years of the Workshop has unfortunately been lost. If you have such information, 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!
February 16. John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), “Black Lives in the Early U.S. Book Trades.” "From the revolutionary era through the 1820s, free and enslaved people of African descent worked in virtually every aspect of book production, from presswork to papermaking, binding, and distribution, but to date no comprehensive survey has been conducted of these communities. Most scholars who have written on the topic rely on Isiaah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1810) as the basis of their investigations, but Thomas only names three examples. This talk expands the range of actors through evidence found in newspapers, business records, and indenture forms; at the same time, it also proposes a broader definition of who counts as part of book trade activity by including tradespeople such as carpenters, bricklayers, and wagoners. After sharing some of this evidence, the talk reconstructs the stories of two extraordinary lives: James Moody, a free Black papermaker from revolutionary Boston, and Andrew Cain, a Black pressman who contributed to the Quaker abolitionist press and who labored in Philadelphia’s print shops for over forty years." John Garcia is Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships at the American Antiquarian Society, where he oversees the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. His publications have appeared in journals such as Early American Studies, Criticism, Book History, and New England Quarterly, and his 2023 NEQ article on the seventeenth-century transatlantic book trade won the Whitehill Prize in Early American History. He is a Senior Fellow and former President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and occasionally teaches summer courses in the history of the book for UCLA’s California Rare Book School.
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.
