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 10, at 5:15pm with Prof. Kate Meng Brassel speaking on Binding and the Discipline: Some Paths around the Classics.

Literary research in the discipline of Classical Studies typically begins (and often ends) with a standard edition—a modern text with critical apparatus formatted and bound according to one of three or four scholarly publishing standards. These standard editions—for instance the Oxford Classical Text, Budé, Teubner, and sometimes the Loeb—are so fundamental to the work of Classical Studies that we often overlook the ways in which their own formats and bindings are not neutral features of the texts themselves but the results of historical decisions of editors, printers, and publishers that continue to frame scholarly interpretation. Prof. Brassel suggests that when such material features become naturalized and are left to masquerade as features of literary evidence, they may obscure the historical contingency of fundamental interpretive categories (such as genre and authorship) as well as of disciplinary norms. This presentation explores print and manuscript books of Latin literature from the Italian peninsula of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering in particular case studies of some examples of “obscene” and humorous Latin literature. How did Humanist printers’ choices about format and binding influence the place of the ribald and irreverent in what would become the “Classics” and its canon? How might their readers have responded to these decisions? By examining this generative period of book production and experimentation that precipitated the solidifying of modern norms, the talk reflects upon some of these paths not taken and upon the ways in which alternative bindings might conceal and reveal ancient texts.

Kate Meng Brassel is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of the early Roman empire. She is currently completing her first monograph, Persius’s Book , which argues for reading these Neronian satires as forming a materially self-conscious Roman poetry book.

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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.