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; 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.

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Next Meeting

On October 7, 2024 at 5:15 PM, Craig Robertson (Northeastern University) will present: “Storage: How Paper Does the Work of Paperwork.”

In this talk, I draw on over a decade of research to think about the materiality of paper through the problem of storage. To store is to place something in anticipation of future use; storage technologies claim and shape space in particular ways. I focus on the material properties of two key technologies used to organize the storage of documents in twentieth-century offices: the filing cabinet and the pile. This analysis locates these storage technologies in social relations of power (notably gender, capitalism, and efficiency) which provide the foundation for my argument that storage practices and storage technologies are not neutral.

Craig Robertson is Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. His research uses the issues and concerns of media history and media theory to explore the relationship between information and paper. He is the author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (2021) and The Passport in America: The History of a Document (2010). He has edited two volumes on media history and published in journals across a range of disciplines.

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The Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts, 2024

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”

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Recordings of Past Talks

See our YouTube channel for recordings of talks from this year and previous years.