| 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!
November 16. Zoë Cary-Beckett (University of Washington), "Paper Muscles vs. Black Power: An Afro-Pessimistic Reading of Black Superhero Print History." “What does it mean for a medium to fail to represent Blackness before a story even begins? The limited palettes, absorbent newsprint, and inexpensive printing processes that characterized mainstream comics through the 1970s and 1980s made brown skin nearly impossible to reproduce consistently, while white skin held the sheer stability of paper. As printing technologies improved, Black skin became more legible on the page, largely as collateral benefit of broader industrial changes. This history raises questions that extend beyond the technical limitations of color reproduction. What are the consequences of a medium’s belated accommodation of Black bodies, and what does it mean that such accommodation can occur without any explicit reckoning with the failures that preceded it? This talk considers the relationship between racial representation, technological change, and historical/narrative time. If the superhero genre depends on a perpetual present in which its central figures can be endlessly reproduced and renewed, what happens to Black superheroes whose bodies have never been easily reproducible, never been afforded the privilege of timelessness? I argue that the print history of Black superheroes reveals a tension between the apparent universality of the superhero form and the uneven material and historical conditions under which different bodies become visible within it." Zoë Cary-Beckett is a Seattle-based writer, educator, and comics creator. She teaches Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington and Rhetoric & Composition at South Seattle College. Her academic work has appeared in INKS and The New Review of Film and Television Studies. Zoë completed her PhD at UChicago in 2025 and is the author of Black Butterflies, a forthcoming graphic novel with Abrams ComicArts.
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.
