| 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!
The final presentation in the Fall 2025 program of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts takes place on Monday, December 1, at 5:15pm with Prof. Emily Green speaking on Of Bad Candles and Glasses, Earthquakes, and Headaches: Reasons for Musical Error around 1770. This talk examines the external and internal factors that could have distracted musicians - professional, amateur, and enslaved - across many performance contexts in the Atlantic world in the 1770s, leading to error. These potential hindrances included bad candles, poorly “corrective” glasses, bells, earthquakes, and various kinds of serious ailments and losses. The goals of this talk are to encourage us to consider music reading and music making as activities that happen in concert with many particular states of mind, body, and environment, and to acknowledge that error may be a part of rather than anathema to expression. Emily Green is Associate Professor of Music at George Mason University. She is interested in work that expands her own and her students’ understanding of who participated in music making—and how—in the eighteenth century. She has edited, with Mary Caton Lingold and Maria Ryan, a forthcoming volume of musical sources from early Black Atlantic musicians (pre-1830), and has created a web-based resource for music educators, Early Black Music in Performance. Her current project, Making Mistakes in Eighteenth-Century Music, explores the pressures and problems of musical performance in its various social contexts across Northern Europe, the Caribbean, and Colonial United States. She is also author of the book Dedicating Music, 1785-1850 and articles in scholarly journals and outlets for wider audiences, and is coeditor (with Catherine Mayes) of Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730-1830.
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 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: 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.
