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Centre for Material Cultures and Materialities

Established in 2022, the Centre for Material Cultures and Materialities (CMCM) acts as a hub for University of Birmingham staff and students interested in the material world.

Situated in Birmingham, a city which has a long history of making and material knowledge, CMCM champions the importance of better understanding our complex relationships to the material world. Our work explores how people navigate and exploit the material world to sustain and express meanings, power structures, and social relationships across space and time. Situated in the College of Arts and Law, CMCM works with staff and students across the University of Birmingham and reaches out to curators, archivists, practitioners, and makers elsewhere.

It works closely with the object and art collections across campus, and particularly with those in the College of Arts and Law, such as the Danford Collection, the Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology Museum, the Eton Myers Collection and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Objectives

In the short-term, the Centre seeks to:

  • Create an intellectual community for University of Birmingham colleagues who work on material cultures and materialities
  • Further develop awareness of the importance of object collections within the College of Arts and Law at University of Birmingham and what they offer in terms of research and teaching
  • Foster international networks through partnering with other centres, such as the Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

In the long term, the Centre seeks to:

  • Become a leading destination for the study of contemporary and historical material cultures in the UK
  • Create and deliver interdisciplinary modules, that allow students to benefit from expertise across CAL
  • Develop funding bids and original publication projects with inter-disciplinarity at their centre by highlighting and facilitating interconnections which foster methodological innovation
  • Build partnerships and networks with national and international external partners
  • Foster new and existing links with regional exhibition spaces, collections, and societies to further the interpretation of objects and spaces, develop practice and create pathways to impact in diverse communities

Our researchers

 

Collections

From the earliest years of its existence as Mason Science College, and from 1900 as the University of Birmingham, objects have played an integral role in our teaching and learning here on campus. Before the advent of audio visual and digital media, lecturers and professors engaged their students through objects, and it is these objects that form the original nucleus of the University of Birmingham Research and Cultural Collections.

In the original plans drawn up for the University's new Edgbaston site in the 1890s, provision was made for at least eight separate museums relating to academic disciplines, including: Commerce, Applied Chemistry, Metallurgy, Mining, Engineering, Geology and Physiology. The extended collections in Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, Physics and Astronomy, and Department of African Studies and Anthropology contain the majority of the original collections, some of which were built up over decades by purchase, gift or collection. Collections held by other schools gradually disappeared in the 1960s through a lack of awareness of their present or future value.

The University’s art collections grew from the 1960s through the dedication of a small number of determined academics who laid the foundations of the collections with commissions and acquisitions of work by artists including William Gear, Barbara Hepworth and Peter Lanyon. Their example encouraged the University to continue to develop the art collections from the 1990s up to the present day, adding works by commission, purchase or gift by Sonia Lawson, Julian Meredith, Nicholas Pope, John Walker, Hans Schwarz, Peter Randall-Page and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. The collections were consolidated in 1991 when a survey was made of the miscellaneous groups of paintings and works on paper, sculpture, cultural artefacts, and ceremonial objects that were to be found across the University campus and a part time curator was appointed to begin the task of cataloguing, organising and assessing the collections. This programme of cataloguing, assessing and redisplaying the collections has continued in line with historical precedent, when the African and archaeological collections were the first to be given museum-quality display cases.

Today there are five sites which hold collections

Collections related to the College of Arts and Law include

Publications

Dr Nathan Cardon

Books

  • Nathan Cardon, A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World’s Fairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)
  • Nathan Cardon, The World Awheel: Americans in the First Global Bicycle Age, 1885-1929. “Global America” series. Under contract with Columbia University Press

Articles

  • Nathan Cardon , “Global Mass Culture, Mobile Subjectivities, and the Southern Landscape: The Bicycle in the New South, 1887-1920,” Journal of American Studies (forthcoming 2022)
  • Nathan Cardon , “Cycling on the Color Line: Race, Technology, and Bicycle Mobilities in the Early Jim Crow South, 1887-1905,” Technology & Culture 62, no. 4 (October 2021): 973-1002
  • Nathan Cardon, “‘Less Than Mayhem’: Louisiana’s Convict Lease, 1865-1901” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana History Association (Fall, 2017): 416-439
  • Nathan Cardon, “The South’s ‘New Negroes’ and African American Visions of Progress at the Atlanta and Nashville International Expositions, 1895-1897,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 2 (May 2014): 287-326

Professor Karen Harvey

Books

  • Karen Harvey, The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020)
  • Alm, M., Harvey, K., eds. Powers of Description: Language and Social History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Stockholm Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia 2019)
  • Karen Harvey ed. History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Abingdon: Routledge 2017)
  • Karen Harvey Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press paperback 2014)
  • Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004; paperback 2008)
  • Karen Harvey ed. The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005 Simultaneous hardback and paperback)

Journal articles

  • Karen Harvey ‘One British Thing: A History of Embodiment: Ann Purvis, ca.1793–1849’, Journal of British Studies, Vol.59 (1), 2020 p.136-139.
  • Karen Harvey ‘Epochs of Embodiment: Sex and the Material Body in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42, 4, 2019 pp. 455-69.
  • Karen Harvey, ‘The End of Craft? The Force of Embodied Male Labour in Industrial Manufacture in Early-Nineteenth Century Sheffield and Birmingham’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2018
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Envisioning the Past: Art, Historiography and Public History’, Cultural and Social History [Published without revisions] 12, 4, 2015 pp.527-543
  • Karen Harvey, ‘What Mary Toft Felt: Language, Emotions and the Body’, History Workshop Journal, 2015 80, pp. 31-51
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Men of Parts: Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 54, 4, 2015 pp. 797-821.
  • Karen Harvey, ‘The Manuscript History of Tristram Shandy’, The Review of English Studies, 65, 269, 2014 pp.281-301.
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Ritual encounters: punch parties and masculinity in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 214, 2012 pp. 165-203
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Visualizing Reproduction: a Cultural History of Early-Modern and Modern Medical Illustrations’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 31, 1, 2010 pp. 37-51.
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Gender & History, 21, 3, 2009 pp. 520-540.
  • Karen Harvey, ‘The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Body’, Gender and History, 14, 2, 2002 pp. 202-23.

Chapters in books

  • Karen Harvey ‘Craftsmen in Common: Skills, Objects and Masculinity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, invited submission for Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett and Leonie Hannan, eds., Gender and Material Culture c.1750-1950. London: Palgrave, pp. 68-89 (2015)
  • Karen Harvey, ‘Politics by Design: Consumption, Identity and Allegiance’ in Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, eds., Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Perspectives in Economic and Social History. London: Pickering and Chatto, pp. 11-22 (2014)

Dr Leire Olabarria

Kate Smith

Books

  • Kate Smith and Rosie Dias (eds) British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940 (New York, 2019).
  • Kate Smith and Margot Finn (eds) The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 (London, 2018).
  • Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (Manchester, 2014).

Journal articles

  • Kate Smith, ‘Lost Things and the Making of Material Cultures in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Social History, 55:1 (2021), 1-24.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Amidst Things: New Histories of Commodities, Capital and Consumption’, Historical Journal, 61:2 (2018), 1-21.
  • Kate Smith and Leonie Hannan, ‘Return and Repetition: Methods for Material Culture Studies’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:I (2017), 1-17.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Empire and the Country House in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Amhersts of Montreal Park, Kent’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 16:3(2015), n.p.
  • Kate Smith, ‘In Her Hands: Materializing Distinction in Georgian Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 11:4 (2014), 489-506.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Sensing Design and Workmanship: The Haptic Skills of Shoppers in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 25:1 (March 2012), 1-10.

Book chapters and essays

  • Kate Smith, ‘Crinoidal Limestone and Staffordshire Teapots: Material and Temporal Scales in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ in Chloe Wigston-Smith and Beth Tobin (eds), Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Values of the Miniature (Cambridge, 2022), xx-xx.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Silence and Secrecy in Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Ceramics Industry’, in Kristine Bruland, Anne Gerritsen, Pat Hudson and Giorgio Riello (eds), Reinventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (Montreal, 2020), 59-71.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Production, purchase, dispossession, recirculation: Anglo-Indian ivory furniture in the British country house’, in Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 (London, 2018), 68-87.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Manly objects? Gendering armorial porcelain wares’, in Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 (London, 2018), 113-130.
  • Kate Smith and Margot Finn, ‘Refashioning house, home and family: Montreal Park, Kent and Touch House, Stirlingshire’, Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 (London, 2018), 153-174.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Warfield Park, Berkshire: Longing, Belonging and the Country House’, in Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857(London, 2018), 175-190.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Englefield House, Berkshire: Processes and Practices and the Making of a Company House’, in Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 (London, 2018), 191-204.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Imperial Objects? Country House Interiors in 18th-Century Britain’, in Jon Stobart and Andrew Hann (eds), The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption (London, 2015), 111-18.

Teaching

Teaching Material Culture

On Monday 31 October, the Centre for Material Cultures and Materialities at the University of Birmingham and the Center for Design and Material Culture at UW-Madison joined together to explore how we do and could teach material culture.

Material culture studies is a distinctly inter-disciplinary field. Yet, in teaching our students about the exciting possibilities offered by material culture studies, our lessons are often shaped by our own disciplinary training. By bringing together art historians, with historians and archaeologists we considered how material culture approaches are taught in different disciplines to rethink how it might be taught and engaged with more broadly.

The discussion panel was chaired by Kate Nichols (Art History, Birmingham) and featured Sarah Anne Carter (Center for Design and Material Culture, UW-Madison), Marina Moskowitz (Center for Design and Material Culture, UW-Madison) Sophie Pitman (Center for Design and Material Culture, UW-Madison), Daniel Reynolds (Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, Birmingham) and Kate Smith (History, Birmingham).

Access a recording of the session

Passcode: g5s+.X57

Below you will find some of the reading suggestions and exercise ideas that emerged from our discussion.

Reading Suggestions for Teaching Material Culture Methodologies and Subjects

Starting Points and Provocations:

  • Leora Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’, American Historical Review, 110:4 (2005), 1015-1045.
  • Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Otto Sibum, 'AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture', American Historical Review, 114:5 (2009), 1354-1404.
  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972).
  • Beverly Gordon, ‘The Hand of the Maker: The Importance of Understanding Textiles from the “Inside Out”’, in Silk Roads, Other Roads: Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America (2003), n.p.
  • Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (New York, 2022).
  • Jules David Prown, ‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method’, Winterthur Portfolio, 17:1 (1982), 1-19.
  • Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven and London, 2001). [Esp. Ch. 14 – ‘Material/Culture: Can the Farmer and the Cowman Still Be Friends?]
  • Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s Coat’, in Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York, 1998), 183-207.
  • Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices and Politics’, Journal of British Studies, 48:2 (2009), 283-307.
  • Sherry Turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA, 2007). [Within this volume, the following are particularly compelling: Annalee Newitz, ‘My Laptop’; David Mitten, ‘The Axehead’; Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The Silver Pin’]

Useful Handbooks:

  • Sarah Anne Carter and Ivan Gaskell (eds), The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford, 2020).
  • Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds), Writing Material Culture History (London, 2015).
  • Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington, Ind, 1999).
  • Tara Hamling, 'Visual and Material Sources', Jonathan Willis and Laura Sangha (eds), Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources(Routledge, 2016).
  • Leonie Hannan and Sarah Longair (eds), History through Material Culture (Manchester, 2017).
  • Karen Harvey (ed), History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London, 2017).
  • Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling and David Gaimster (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2017).
  • Christopher Y. Tilley (ed.), Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006).

Further suggestions:

  • Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1996).
  • Joanne Bailey, ‘Meditating on Materiality’, Cultural History, 3:2 (2014), 190-197.
  • Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London, 2010).
  • Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London and New York, 2010).
  • Robin Bernstein, ‘Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race’, Social Text, 101 (2009), 67-94.
  • Bill Brown, (ed.), Things (Chicago and London, 2004). [Esp. Ch 1 – ‘Thing Theory’]
  • Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review, 12:1 (2003), 5-35.
  • Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, eds., Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018).
  • Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford, 2006).
  • Dena Goodman, ‘Furnishing Discourses: Readings of a Writing Desk in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century(London, 2002), 71-88.
  • Richard Grassby, ‘Material Culture and Cultural History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35:4 (2005), 591-603.
  • Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (eds), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Ashgate, 2010).
  • Leonie Hannan and Kate Smith, ‘Return and Repetition: Methods for Material Culture Studies’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:I (2017), 1-17.
  • Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2012).
  • Rosemary Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice (2015).
  • Ann Smart Martin, ‘Makers, buyers and users – consumerism as a material culture framework’, Winterthur Portfolio, 28:2/3 (1993), 141-157.
  • Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
  • Prudence M. Rice, Pottery Analysis (Chicago, 2015).
  • Ulinka Rublack, ‘Matter in the Renaissance’, Past & Present, 219:1 (2013), 41-85.
  • Kate Smith, ‘Amidst Things: New Histories of Commodities, Capital and Consumption’, The Historical Journal, 61:3 (2018), 841-861.
  • Carolyn Steedman, ‘What a Rag Rug Means’, Journal of Material Culture, 3:3 (1998), 259-281.
  • Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London, 1993).
  • Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific(Cambridge, MA and London, 1991).
  • Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara J. Schechner and Sarah Anne Carter, Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (New York, 2015).
  • Sophie White, ‘‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his neck, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans’, Gender & History 15: 3 (2003), 528-49.