Workshop in the History of Material Texts


Workshop in the History of Material Texts

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.)

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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!

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Next Meeting

The next presentation in the Fall 2025 program of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts takes place on Monday, November 3, at 5:15pm with Prof. Sonja Drimmer speaking on Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print.

The Boke of St Albans (c.1486) is celebrated as a milestone in the history of the book, counting as the first volume printed in multiple colors in England. Narratives of its technical novelty, however, obscure the conventional nature of its engagement with print; for not only was “impression” a robustly theorized concept prior to the introduction of the printing press, but medieval treatises on heraldry--of which this is one-- were venues for its theorization. In this talk I discuss how impression-based theories of vision informed the late medieval understanding of heraldry as the preeminent political object: a visual phenomenon where alternative perspectives are possible, but only one is correct. Far from using colored inks to elucidate the heraldic treatise it contains, The Boke of St Albans reveals how much one needs to correct one's vision in order to bring one's sight into accord with others’.

Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (UPenn, 2018) is the first study devoted to the origins of the English literary canon as an illustrated corpus, and it received High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art. Her most recent publication, “Queer Transmissions: English Manuscript, Italian Print, and a Discomforting History of the Book,” appeared in Renaissance Studies, and she is currently completing a monograph titled Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England.

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The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts, 2025

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 4, 2025, through this form.

Eligibility:

1) For undergraduates: essays must have been written in Spring 2024, Fall 2024, or Spring 2025 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: Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor, History of Art; Julie Nelson Davis, Professor, History of Art; Deven M. Patel, Associate Professor, South Asia Studies; 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”

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Recordings of Past Talks

See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.