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. 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.
Eligibility:
Essays should be no more than 10,000 words (but can be shorter, of course).
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2) For graduate students: essays must be unpublished work.
Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English
John Pollack, Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center
Jerome Singerman, 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 (Assistant Professor, English)