Material Culture and Commodities Reading Group
Programme 2014/15
Tuesdays, 12-1pm, in H0.45
The Material Culture and Commodities Reading Group aims to discuss the issues and opportunities of centering objects,
things, and commodities at the heart of academic research. In each session, we hope to explore a theme of material culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. For more information, please contact Rachael Morton (R.Morton@warwick.ac.uk) or Kimberley Thomas (K.E.Thomas@warwick.ac.uk)
TERM 2
3 February 2015 (Week 5) - Alternative Exchanges: Gifting, Lending, Stealing
Marcel Mauss, The Gift (to be pre-circulated); Beverly Lemire, "The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England," Journal of Social History 24/2 (1990): 255-276; Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme, eds. Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption, Cultures and Practices, 1700-1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) - pick one chapter to read, available online.
This will compliment the upcoming conference 'Making and Mobilising Objects' to be held in Warwick on Saturday 21 February. www.makingobjects.com
3 March 2015 (Week 9) - Objects in Art, and Objects as Art
Susan Deans-Smith, "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain," Colonial Latin American Review 14/2 (2005): 169-204. We will also discuss the Disobedient Objects Exhibition at the V&A, which you can visit until 1 Feb or explore the website at www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/. We will also consider the exhibition catalogue, in which there is a roundtable discussion, and other images.
TERM 2
4 February 2014
Object Lifecycle
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Hannah Barnard's Cupboard," in The Age of Homespun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 108-142. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things," in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-95.
18 February 2014
Object Agency
Janet Hoskins, "Agency, Biography and Objects" (Available Online). Bruno Latour, "Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too have Agency," in Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory.
4 March 2014
Objects in Literature
Natasha Korda, "The Sign of the Last: Gender, Material Culture and Artisnal Nostalgia in the Shoemaker's Holiday," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43/3 (2013): 573-597. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
TERM 3
6 May 2014
Objects as Things
Bill Brown, "Thing Theory," Critical Enquiry 28/1 (2001): 1-22. Peter Schwenger, "Words and the Murder of the Thing," Critical Enquiry 28/1 (2001): 99-113.
20 May 2014
Emotional Objects
Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins, "Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in Country Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England," Journal of Victorian Culture 18 (2013): 93-114. Arthur Asa Berger, "The Objects of Our Affection" (Chapter 5) in The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 116-167.
3 June 2014
Objects as Commodities
Joan Bristol, "A Trail of Precious Goods: Colonial Latin American Commodity History," History Compass 11/11 (2013): 948-956. Bruce Robbins, "Commodity Histories," PMLA 120/2 (2005): 454-463. Bertie Mendelblatt, "A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic World," History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 18-47.
17 June 2014
Objects in Action
This week we plan to bring in a few objects or images of objects to discuss. Please feel free to bring in any yourself!
