| 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 2. Hester Blum (Washington University in St. Louis), “Polar Erratics, Arctic Ephemera.” “This talk is about Arctic ephemera and ephemerality, both as textual production and polar humanistic method. In earlier work I studied shipboard nonce printing by historical polar expeditions, such as comical ship newspapers, notes in bottles, cairn messages, rescue notices printed on colored silk and sent by fire balloon, playbills, and menus. In my current project, I have turned from archival exploration in libraries to edge experiences in the Arctic and Antarctica. On tall ships and icebreakers, in Inuit, Sámi, and Kalaallit hamlets, across Arctic archipelagoes and the Antarctic peninsula, I have encountered an eccentric collection of textual and cultural forms that are unexpectedly out of place (like glacial erratics, conveyed by large-scale environmental change) yet which must be accounted for in the new landscape formed in the wake of climate disturbance. These include nineteenth-century British expeditionary food tins embedded in the tundra beside an eleventh-century Thule structure still used as a campsite by Inuit today; laminated bookmarks offering Antarctic cruise ship passengers “Advice from a Glacier” to "Avoid Meltdowns" and "Be Cool"; metal trash from a failed North Pole expedition in 1926 sitting alongside a swastika formed of glacial erratic rocks. These “polar erratics”—fleeting, transitory—suggest the centrality of ephemerality to polar humanities field work." Hester Blum is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies (Courtesy Affiliation) at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Duke 2019) and The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (UNC 2008), and the editor of the Oxford edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (2022), among other volumes. Blum has three books in progress: Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in the Arctic and Antarctica; Lonesome Dove Reread (Columbia University Press, under contract); and Seamen’s Lexicon (Reaktion Books, under contract). She has participated in several research trips to the Arctic and Antarctica, and her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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.
