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 project touches upon both form and content, as we pursue a lyrical and experimental style of writing along with a more humane, collaborative, and supportive process of scholarship.

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.

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

We encourage spontaneity in writing art history, including an acknowledgement of our subject positions; therefore we embrace the incorporation of personal narrative and reflection in our historical interpretations.

We are also working to increase the legitimacy of these approaches in the academic world, primarily by practicing them, loudly and often.

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

Central to this effort is a desire to support each other as we attempt to create experimental approaches, and to embrace both the successes and potential failures of our ventures into new ways of thinking.

We are as much a support group as a scholarly group. We share the joys and sorrows of career, life and our academic work.

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.

For us, this is not a mere exercise—we stand by our manifesto. And we revel in this opportunity to raise a glass with all y’all, right here and now.

We value: experimental processes; risk-taking; transparency, revelation; a blank space; joy in faltering, together. So say we all. So say we all.