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.

CFP: Ecological Seeing I & II (Kalamazoo, May 2023)

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​​CALL FOR PAPERS International Congress on Medieval Studies Kalamazoo, MI May 11-13, 2023  Ecological Seeing I – Teaching Environmental Art History Ecological Seeing II – New Research in Environmental Art History Sponsored by the Material Collective. Co-organized by Danielle Joyner (Lawrence University), Nancy Thebaut (Skidmore College) & Benjamin C. Tilghman (Washington College / The Material […]

Keep Fighting!

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Stand up and say it again: don’t mourn, organize! We are gutted, we are angry, but we really aren’t surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And we, like you, feel called to take some kind of action. With federal protection for women’s bodies now gone, we must turn our attention and […]

CFP: Medievalism, Orientalism, Capitalism.

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The organizers of Material Collective’s sponsored session at Kalamazoo 2022 seek papers that analyze 19th- and 20th-century collecting and/or building projects within their political, social, economic, and cultural environments, through examinations of the financial structures that enabled their creation, nationalist and colonialist appropriation and collecting strategies, and issues of class such as the relationships between artists and patrons.