| 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 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 March 31, 2025 at 5:15, Peter Emanuel Diamond (University of Pennsylvania) will present: “‘Inscriptions of Sundry Sorts’: Literacy, Populism, and Early American Epigraphic Culture.”
From poems affixed to maypoles to Virgilian quotations inscribed in domestic doorways, early America was filled with epigraphs. For settlers who broke with the colonial authorities in power, the epigraph was a tool to transform public space into a contested site of warring words. Radical invocations of the epigraph were especially common among early American populists in the spheres of education and missionary work. My talk will focus on the writings of two such figures: Thomas Morton of New England and Francis Daniel Pastorius of Pennsylvania, both of whom saw mass alphabetic literacy as key to an egalitarian colonial society. I will consider the theological and political stakes of Morton’s and Pastorius’s obsessions with affixed and inscribed pieces of writing in colonial public space. I will also argue that epigraphic culture informed the literary innovations of these writers’ major written works, such as Morton’s inventive extracting and marginalia and Pastorius’s revolutionary commonplacing. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how early American debates about the when, where, and how of the written word became contests to determine the centers and margins of colonial society. Peter Emanuel Diamond is a PhD candidate in English at University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation studies radical Protestant thinkers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America who imagined themselves as doubly exiled, both from Europe and from mainstream colonial life. In the Penn Libraries, Peter served as project manager of the Digital Beehive, where he oversaw the digital annotation of the longest section of Francis Daniel Pastorius’s thousand-page commonplace book. Last year, Peter held the Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and he currently serves as the Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts.
During the week of March 24, 2025, Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University) will deliver the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography: “Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation.”
Professor Wisecup will deliver three lectures, which each begin at 5:30 PM on their respective days (note the later-than-usual start time). All three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below). Remote participants should note that the Rosenbach Lectures use a different Zoom link from the usual Material Texts link, and you must register for each lecture you wish to attend to receive the appropriate Zoom links.
In this series of three lectures, Kelly Wisecup examines how Indigenous peoples made and used the page to address structures of dispossession. The backbone for these three lectures is Pokagon Band of Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting (alt. title Red Man’s Rebuke), which was first printed on sheets of birchbark in 1893. (In selecting this title, Pokagon followed uses of “red man” by other Indigenous writers as a term of critique and political appeal.) Framed as an exceptional book both in 1893 and in the present, the Greeting/Rebuke actually participated in a larger Indigenous practice of making pages and books out of birchbark. These lectures tell an Indigenous history of the page by focusing on birchbark bookmaking in the late 19th and early 20th century, when these practices intersected with Indigenous peoples’ experiences of deforestation and with U.S. settlers’ responses to their own demand for and destruction of forests to make woodpulp paper.
Over the past thirty years, studies of Indigenous print cultures and literacies have shown how Indigenous peoples adapted their writing systems, aesthetics, and material forms to the codex and the alphabet, as well as how American literature reflects settler writers’ interactions with Indigenous writing systems. Building on this scholarship, Wisecup turns to the page and its relationships with trees as a significant yet overlooked element in both Indigenous book histories and in the field of bibliography writ large. The lectures take the page as a site for studying relationships among books, periodicals, papermaking, and environmental degradation. Bringing Indigenous Studies and bibliographical methods into closer conversation is necessary to understanding Indigenous experiments with bookmaking and the myriad relationships with trees that these experiments expressed.
On Monday, March 24, 2025 at 5:30 PM, Professor Wisecup will present: “Bibliography and Indigenous Books.”
Register to attend this lecture (in person or online).
Lecture one begins the series by considering the relationships — possible, deferred, and disavowed — between the fields of book history and bibliography on the one hand and Indigenous books on the other. Setting up the week’s focus on birchbark pages and bookmaking, Wisecup argues that the page plays an important yet overlooked role in Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the book. To model possible new relationships between bibliography and Indigenous book history, she rereads D.H. McKenzie’s essay on the Treaty of Waitangi in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts alongside Indigenous peoples’ use of the page as a site for representing and critiquing conceptions of Indigeneity and the book.
On Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 5:30 PM, Professor Wisecup will present: “Paper Ecologies and Birchbark Bookmaking.”
Register to attend this lecture (in person or online).
Before contemporary scholarly discussions about the role of the nonhuman entities — from animals to plants to rags to trees — that constitute pages, Indigenous people made birchbark books and containers that forged and indexed relationships among books and trees. This lecture is a history of Indigenous peoples’ birchbark bookmaking that asks why this practice increased at a moment when Indigenous homelands in the Great Lakes were being deforested. Wisecup also experiments with what a bibliography of birchbark pages might entail, to ask how scholars might adjust bibliographic methods to account for Indigenous peoples’ theorizations of tree temporalities, both ephemeral and enduring.
On Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 5:30 PM, Professor Wisecup will present: “Bibliographical Pasts and Futures: Periodical Cultures, Industrial Papermaking, and Birchbark Remediations.”
Register to attend this lecture (in person or online).
In this final lecture, Wisecup examines Indigenous periodical print cultures alongside woodpulp papermaking at the turn of the 20th century. Birchbark substrates were refigured in early 20th century narratives, as indicated by settler authors’ citations of birchbark pages on woodpulp paper and in forms ranging from nostalgic pastorals to paper company’s promotional materials to industrial romances. Wisecup concludes with a look at how Indigenous artists remediate birchbark forms and thereby gesture to the intertwined histories of paper and birchbark pages.
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 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.
