The Penn Manuscript collective is a collaborative humanities research initiative between Professor Peter Stallybrass and undergraduates with the support and supervision of Will Noel, director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. We seek to to involve students of all levels of expertise in manuscript transcription and research. 

Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. For the last fourteen years, he has directed the seminar on the History of Material Texts, and he co-edits the Material Texts series for the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Globe Theater, London, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, this country’s first learned society, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743.

Will Noel is  the Director of the Special Collections Center and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, before which he worked at The Walters Art Museum as Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books. A distinguished art historian, Dr. Noel has groundbreaking experience in the application of digital technologies to manuscript studies.

 

 

 

John Baranik (C’16) is an English Major from North Carolina. Co-founder of the Penn Manuscript Collective, he has studied letters, commonplace books, and manuscripts of early Americans.

 

 

Nicole Williams (C’15) is an English major with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Philadelphia. She is the co-founder of the Penn Manuscript Collective, studying early Philadelphia manuscripts.

 

 

 

Ben Notkin  (C’14) is an English and History major from Washington. He has a minor in Physics and is interested in literature in history, microhistory, and heteronymns.

 

 

Nick DeFina (C’16) is a sophomore in Penn’s College of Arts & Sciences. An undeclared English/German major, he is co-editor of Symbiosis, Penn’s collaborative arts literary magazine. He also reads and writes in his free time. He likes the 19th century, Kronos Quartet and Emily Dickinson.