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.

Collections-based Teaching and Social Justice

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[Guest post by Jennifer P. Kingsley] I am a non-disabled white cisgender woman specializing in the arts of medieval Europe and Byzantium. When I was in graduate school, my PhD department focused almost entirely on western Europe. Today, I run an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in museum studies. I have an abiding interest in how museums […]

Teaching beyond the borders of medieval art

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[Guest post by Alexa Sand, Professor of Art History, Utah State University] As recent discussions within the field of medieval studies and medieval art history in particular have made clear, there are politics to the way in which we organize our survey courses and present the “Middle Ages” to our students. In the wake of some disturbing recent […]

VOTE!

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We interrupt our regularly-scheduled art-history pedagogy posts* for this brief and urgent plea: VOTE AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT! This is no longer about the American two-party system as it once existed. People over 40 like me can remember a time when we disagreed with Republican policies, but were able to have a […]

Calling All Art History Teachers!

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Well, it’s already October, and the fall semester is in full swing! If you’re like me, you wrote your syllabi a while back and you felt more-or-less prepared on Day 1. Then, when you met the actual humans in your class, you immediately began to see all the flaws in the document—and the course—that you […]