John H. Pollack
John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He is also responsible for the Furness Shakespeare Library, which is part of the Kislak Center.
John holds a PhD in English from Penn and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages; colonial writings from New France; and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.
*For Zoom information, please please contact Aylin Malcolm.
Our speaker writes:
Those who study literary forgery deal above all with immaterial texts. The careers of a number of prominent forgers, though, have depended on their handling of the physical embodiments of these texts. Three eighteenth-century literary forgeries — the cases of James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton, and William Henry Ireland — reveal different approaches to material texts through the stages of conception, production, evaluation, and even subsequent collection.
About our speaker:
Jack Lynch received his PhD from Penn in 1998, and since then has been at Rutgers University-Newark, where he is now professor of English. He is the author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and trade books including You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia.
Talks will be held live, in person, in the Class of 78 Pavilion, 6th floor, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. They will also be available via Zoom (please contact us for details). All are welcome. If you would like to receive details on future talks, please sign up for our listserv using this link or visit the Workshop website.
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts is supported by the School of Arts and Sciences through the Department of English and hosted by the Penn Libraries. The co-directors of the seminar are Professor Zachary Lesser (English), Jerry Singerman (Penn Press, Emeritus), and John Pollack (Kislak Center, Penn Libraries).
Associated with the workshop is the book series in Material Texts published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, which includes many monographs that have emerged from presentations given at the workshop over the years.
For more information, please contact Aylin Malcolm.
