| 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 Workshop began in January, 1993. (Information about talks from 1993–1995, before email records, is more thin, often limited only to speaker and date. We are very grateful to Carolyn Jacobson, who provided that information from her contemporary paper notes. If you have further information about titles or abstracts for these talks, 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!
October 12. David McKnight (Retd., University of Pennsylvania), “Not Guilty: Frances Steloff vs. the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice" “This paper investigates the multi-decade legal and material battle over literary modernism by examining the frontline resistance of Frances Steloff and her iconic bookstore, the Gotham Book Mart. Operating at the volatile intersection of avant-garde print networks in Greenwich Village and high-traffic commercial hubs in Midtown Manhattan, Steloff positioned her shop as a vital transit point for restricted, imported, and privately printed texts. Consequently, the Gotham Book Mart became a primary target for John S. Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who utilized undercover entrapment tactics to convert routine retail practices—such as custom special orders—into criminal distribution charges. Through an analysis of archival property manifests, financial ledgers, and municipal court cases—specifically People v. Gotham Book Mart, Inc. (1935)—this study charts a fundamental bibliographic and legal evolution. It demonstrates how early 20th-century censorship machinery, operating under the 1868 Hicklin Rule, targeted the physical codex through indexical fragment-hunting and isolated textual extraction. In response, Steloff’s aggressive defenses, coordinated alongside civil liberties attorney Morris Ernst, forced a systemic shift toward a holistic, whole-work standard of legal evaluation. By contextualizing street-level encounters, such as the 1928 inventory sweeps and the defiant 1945 Lazy Hardware window installation, this paper argues that independent booksellers did not merely distribute literature; their spatial and material practices actively safeguarded the modern literary canon and dismantled the institutional architecture of moral censorship." Recently retired, David McKnight is the former Director of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Mr. McKnight possesses a BA in Classics and History (McGill University, Montreal, 1985), an MLIS (McGill University, Montreal, 1992) and an MA in English Literature (Concordia University, Montreal, 1993). Prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, McKnight was the Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Head of the Digital Collections Program at McGill University Libraries. He worked for McGill Libraries for fifteen years. McKnight possesses a particular knowledge and interest in the history of avant-garde literature, art, and publishing from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Recently, he curated two major exhibitions, Experiment: Printing the Canadian Imagination (University of Alberta, 2018) and Wise Men Fished Here: A Centenary Exhibition in Honor of the Gotham Book Mart: 1920 – 2020 (Kislak Center for Special Collections, 2019). In 2021, McKnight co-edited Cross-Cultural Pound (Clemson University Press, 2021) with John G. Gery and Walter Baumann. In 2023, McKnight edited a catalog of Andy Warhol Screen prints, entitled Out of Sight: A Collector, A Discovery and Andy Warhol (Penn Libraries).
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: Julie Nelson Davis (2026-27) ; Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English (on leave, 2026-27); John Pollack, Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center
Advisory Board: Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor, Italian Studies; Jim Duffin, Assistant University Archivist; Whitney Trettien, Associate Professor, English
Congratulations to our Spring 2026 winners!
Undergraduate Category:
Winner: Iris Péron-Ames (History of Art), ““Enshrining the Word: The Shrine of the Cathach”
Graduate Category:
Winner: Rita de Cássia do Monte Lima (History of Art), "On the Edge of the Herbal: Knowledge, Images and Unmaking in the Schoenberg Herbal (LJS 419)"
See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.
