| 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; click on Get Password under Options on the right-hand side of the page to get started.
Recordings of previous talks are available on our YouTube channel.
On November 18, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Simon Martin (Penn Museum) will present: “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us.”
Ancient Maya inscriptions, which appear on numerous stone monuments as well as more portable items of clay, shell, bone, and stucco, long presented a seemingly irresolvable puzzle. But insights gained from data in Spanish colonial documents, original bark paper books carried away to Europe in the sixteenth century, and, most of all, accurate renderings of the script from the field eventually provided the necessary keys. Beginning in the 1990s, the decipherment of individual signs came rapidly, and the underlying language of the inscriptions became clear. The result was an explosion of new evidence and answers to a great many questions about this remarkable ancient American culture. This talk describes both the process of getting mute stones to speak and the transformative impact of such research on the archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics of the region. Simon Martin gained his PhD in Archaeology at University College London and is currently an Associate Curator and Keeper at Penn Museum and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a political anthropologist and specialist in Maya hieroglyphic writing, with a particular interest in the history, politics, and religious beliefs of the Classic Period (150–900 CE). He has numerous publications to his name and his most recent book, Ancient Maya Politics (Cambridge University Press), won major prizes from the Association of American Publishers and the American Historical Association.The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts will be 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. 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.
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 on the About page.
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Qi Liu (History of Art), “Female Piety and Power: The Appearance of Noli me tangere in Ottonian Manuscripts”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science), “Moving the Divine Mind, Insuring Success: Amulet Diagrams and Practical Kabbalah in a 16th-century Italian Manuscript”
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
