The Material Collective

A collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture

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As a collaborative of art historians and students of visual culture, Material Collective seeks to foster a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects.

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From the Manifesto

We are the Material Collective, a group of medievalists interrogating visual materials. We seek to cooperate, encourage, share, promote transparency, touch, desire, destabilize, amuse, and blunder.

Our specific interests vary, but we are all committed to prioritizing the materiality of things, the relationships between those things and the human beings who experience them, and the intimacy of past and present moments in time.

We strive for transparency in our practice, and we encourage the same in our institutional surroundings.

“As we celebrate, dwell in, and embrace the basic materiality of our objects, we work to find ways to foreground the material of the objects themselves into larger historical analysis.

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Conference Review: The Art of the Poor in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Warburg Institute, University of London, June 14 to 15, 2018

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By: Shannon Emily Gilmore, PhD Candidate, Department of History of Art & Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara An exciting and groundbreaking conference was held at the University of London’s Warburg Institute on June 14 and 15, 2018. The Warburg represents one of the world’s leading centers in the study of images and culture, and its […]

CFP: Intersectional Medievalisms at Kalamazoo 2019

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Medieval studies has a diversity problem. I’m not going to detail it here, mostly because there are many excellent essays that do it better than I could do. But it’s a problem that we all need to keep working on, regardless of the resistance and barriers that get thrown in our way by the institutions […]