| Workshop in the History of Material Texts | |||
| HMT | About | Search | Events | Impact |
|---|
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 2. Priya Nambrath (University of Pennsylvania, “Scribal Worlds in Motion: Loss, Identity, Afterlives.” "In this presentation, I examine the retrospective framing and interpretation of a transcontinental manuscript archive housed at the Bodleian Library, comprising early 16th to early 20th century materials in Sanskrit and several Indian vernaculars, as a predominantly scientific corpus. Through close attention to material form, patterns of use, and modes of accumulation, I argue that the collection is more productively understood as a scribal family archive: an accretive, practical inheritance shaped by apprenticeship, repair, partial copying, and everyday textual labor. The archive’s heterogeneity, previously treated as a problem to be resolved through classification, emerges instead as evidence of a distinct archival logic oriented toward continuity of practice rather than canon formation. Tracing how twentieth-century scholarly intervention reconstituted this lived archive into a coherent scientific resource, reshaping both its organization and its historical legibility, I conclude by proposing archives as relational and historically produced objects, whose coherence is enacted through use, movement, and interpretation rather than discovered as an intrinsic property, and whose meanings remain fundamentally unfinished." Priya Nambrath is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researching the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval and pre-modern Kerala in south India. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Fulbright, Hopkinson and other awards. She is the current Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts.
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.
