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.

The Material Collective at CAA

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We’re pleased to announce an upcoming roundtable panel that we will be co-sponsoring with the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH) at the annual College Art Association Conference in Chicago this February. Over the decade that the Material Collective has been operating, we’ve seen a significant shift in the CAA’s willingness to engage with […]

Untangling the Myth of Linguistic Purity in the Medieval Classroom

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This guest post by Sharon Rhodes considers a subject of great interest in medieval studies at present, the use of the term “Anglo-Saxon.” Rhodes takes a fresh approach to the subject, focusing on how to teach Old English language and literature (with relevance for the teaching of related subjects, such as medieval English art, history, etc.) without welcoming or fostering the racist fantasies about linguistic and cultural “purity” that have plagued the field more or less since its inception.

Don’t Mourn, Organize!

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It’s a well-known saying, a paraphrase of the International Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill’s last words. They’re not easy words to live by.

CFP: POLITICAL MEDIEVALISM (Studies in Medievalism XXX)

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From Hitler’s “Third Reich” to Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism, professional politicians have often invoked the Middle Ages to justify their actions. But they are far from alone, for many of their constituents have also deployed medievalism for political purposes, as in condemning impoverished countries for “failing to escape” the Middle Ages.