A reminder about the next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts on Monday, October 17th, at 5:15 PM Eastern Time. We will convene in the Class of 1978 Pavilion, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. You can also join us online via this link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/94914204988?pwd=MlM1cXNxaDJwUU1SQnNqUHFHOHI5dz09
We will be welcoming Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center) for a talk entitled “Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband.” Tara writes:
Google “Phillis Wheatley,” and her silhouette is easy to find. The widely-reproduced engraving remembers the young (and at times, enslaved) poet by herself and with pen-in-hand. It memorializes the writer at her craft, and it also fixes a lone, singular Wheatley in time. It is a familiar story. This talk will tell another story of the young poet and by implication a new story for early African American writing. This work-in-progress pursues—with a careful certainty—the idea that Wheatley is not actually alone despite how her body is etched, and she, sometimes, passes her evening with someone else’s husband. She is, in fact, part of various communities, and she speaks of them often enough in her letters. It’s a community of friends, acquaintances and neighbors who figure out how to tend and care for one another before and during the Revolutionary War. They buy Wheatley’s book of poems. They live through a war, and they will have to mourn the loss of their friend. It’s a community too that writes, reads, and leaves behind a legacy in manuscript and in print.
Tara A. Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at University of Iowa. She is author of the book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (January 2023).
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FALL 2022 SCHEDULE
Oct. 17: Tara Bynum (University of Iowa & McNeil Center): “Phillis Wheatley Passes an Evening with Someone Else’s Husband”
Oct. 24: Elly Truitt (Penn): “Why Are Clocks?”
Oct. 31: Jamal Elias (Penn): “Writing Commentaries on Non-existent Texts: The Mystery of Ismail Ankaravi’s Commentary on the 7th Volume of Rumi’s Masnavi“
Nov. 7: Peter Stallybrass (Penn): “The Ten Commandments and/as Erasable Wax Tablets”
Nov. 14: Marcy Norton (Penn): “Indigenous Epistemology and Early Modern Science: The Creation of ‘De historia animalium Novae Hispaniae’ (1571–1577)” [Co-sponsored by the Penn Department of History]
Nov. 21: Margaret McAleer (Library of Congress): “Paper + Digital: No Longer Format Agnostic”
Nov. 28: Julie Davis (Penn): “Learning with the Tress Collection”
Dec. 5: Chi-ming Yang (Penn): “Finding Octavia E. Butler in the Archives and around Black Pasadena”
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Zachary Lesser
Edward W. Kane Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Jerry Singerman
Senior Humanities Editor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Press
John Pollack
Curator, Research Services, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Aylin Malcolm
Brizdle-Schoenberg Fellow in the History of Material Texts