Information about planned seminars will be posted here as it becomes available.
The Open University, Michael Young Building, 2.30-4pm.
A one-day seminar for current approaches to working with material culture.
Francescho Lucchini will present work in progress around a single object and its contexts; members of the Material Cultures Research Group will present aspects of their work in progress.
Programme
Discussant: Leon Wainwright
Francesco Lucchini, University of Warwick, on his forthcoming monograph provisionally entitled Aleardino’s Wonder: Objects, Materiality and Imagination, 1200-1600.
A silver-mounted, unbreakable glass from fourteenth-century Padua remained intact after it was cast on the ground by a heretical knight named Aleardino, who had publicly challenged St Anthony of Padua to prove his sainthood. Aleardino confronts the wonder of a glass that is intact whereas it should be broken by construing its material incongruity in terms of miracle and supernatural intervention—an interpretation that won him a conversion. Lucchini argues that Aleardino’s wonder offers a key for interrogating the troubling relationship between the material and the mental, the physical and the conceptual, the mute and the talkative. The association of wonder and things, especially man-made things, can offer illuminating insights on the constraints and possibilities—whether real, perceived or imagined—of techniques and materials.
Kim Woods on alabaster as a material
Susie West on fieldwork and phenomenology
Graham Harvey on how the study of indigenous animisms might contribute to understanding European art and objects
The Open University, Milton Keynes,
Library Presentation Room, Ground Floor Library
Friday 24 June 2011
A one-day seminar for current approaches to working with material culture
The status of material culture, in which we include the visual, varies between and within humanities disciplines. Literary scholars have in recent decades engaged more closely with the ‘history of the book’ to co-produce new accounts of book culture that integrate or foreground aspects of the material, physical, or topographical presence of the media that supports the text. Book historians have developed distinctions between the work (intellectual product) and the text (physical form), and art history and archaeology frame their disciplinary practice and identity in part by their distinctive material cultural repertoires. How far have other disciplines worked through the implications of materiality for their research? Away from the technical, conservation understandings of materials science, how much about the materiality of our research materials and the consequences of materiality/immateriality is ignored, undervalued, or misunderstood?
Programme
Heritage and ontologies of things, Rodney Harrison, The Open University
Theories of matter and material culture: bringing together archaeology, history and philosophy of science, Zena Kamash, University of Oxford
This house was made of mud – how best to understand materiality of buildings,
Louise Cooke, The Open University
Broken stuff, Sara Pennell, University of Roehampton
Michael Landy’s Break Down and the search for the thing, Lindsay Polly Crisp, Goldsmiths, University of London
Discussion led by discussant: Leon Wainwright, The Open University
The Open University, Milton Keynes,
Library Presentation Room, Ground Floor Library
Thursday 23 June 2011
A one-day seminar exploring the role of material culture in materialising (or obscuring) partisanship and factional allegiance.
Keynote speaker, Serena Ferente (Kings College, London)
Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ridiculed the citizens of Siena for the many ways - secret and overt - in which they communicated their factional allegiances. Political sides were communicated by the ways in which bread, garlic or fruit was cut and wine poured. Certain saints were claimed by one or both sides as belonging to and protecting their parties for often spurious reasons.
Contact: Carol M. Richardson (C.M.Richardson@open.ac.uk)
Serena Ferente, “A web of images. Visual signs of party allegiance in late medieval Italy”
Janet Huskinson, “‘Christian’, ‘Crypto-Christian’, or ‘ Not Christian at all’?? How to discuss some imagery on third century Roman sarcophagi”
Jill Harrison, “Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna; a political reading”
Carol M. Richardson, “The Holy Family as a symbol of Guelf allegiance?”
Piers Baker-Bates, “'Imperial identity as displayed in sixteenth-century portraiture; a preliminary study”
Closing remarks
Rodney Harrison co-chaired the Advanced Seminar 'Reassembling the Collection: Indigenous Agency and Ethnographic Objects' at the School for Advanced Reseach in Santa Fe in September 2010. More information is available online.
Coordinated by Jessica Hughes and Piers Baker-Bates
This one-day seminar will take place between 10:00am and 4:15pm on Thursday 11th March 2010 in Meeting Rooms 1&2, Wilson A, Ground Floor.
The role of material culture in formulating, communicating and changing religious beliefs is now the focus of debate in several disciplines, including Religious Studies, Art History, Sociology and Classical Studies. The seminar will bring together academics from different OU departments to explore a number of exciting case studies and to share their theoretical approaches to the subject. We also look forward to welcoming Crispin Paine, one of the editors of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, as external discussant.
Session 1
Crispin Paine (UCL): “Things the sons of Heaven” - why Samuel Johnson was right.
Graham Harvey (OU, RS): Materiality and Spirituality Aren’t Opposites (necessarily): Paganism and objects.
Susie West (OU, Art History): Death of a countess: power, prestige and the Elizabethan church.
Jovan Byford (OU, Psychology): Nikola Tesla - scientist or saint? Miracles, martyrdom, and the politics of dead bodies in contemporary Serbia
Session 2
Amy Whitehead (OU, RS): The Goddess and the Virgin: Examining the Role of Statue Devotion in Western Europe
Rodney Harrison (OU, History): “Objects of veneration: Archaeology, ancestors and place at the former Dennawan Aboriginal Reserve, NSW, Australia ”
Marion Bowman (OU, RS): Materiality, Media and the Mothers’ Saint.
David Spero (Artist - tbc): Churches
Group discussion and then home.
