Material Culture Studies

The Material Culture Studies hub promotes scholarship that considers the production, consumption and trade of goods, while paying attention to how these processes might have engendered connections and/or disconnections in the past.

The Material Culture Studies hub promotes research into the production, consumption and trade of goods, considering  how these processes might have engendered connections and/or disconnections between people, places and things.

Global history and material culture studies have intersected in profoundly important ways in recent years and this move has expanded the field significantly. The incorporation of material culture studies methodologies, in particular, has allowed scholars to consider both the local and the global impact of trade, and the importance of the materiality of objects in production and consumption.

The hub aims to bring together colleagues working material culture across disciplines, facilitating the discussion of methodologies, new publications, and visits to collections.

Convenor

To receive updates or to get involved with the hub please contact the convenor Professor Jill Burke.

Semester 1 2025/6

The theme of this year's hubs is 'material literacy'. It will involve hands-on taster sessions in a range of practices that reflect common knowledge in the pre-industrial world, but increasingly fell out of use. In the first semester, we'll investigate medicinal plants and handspinning before considering the use of reconstruction in pedagogy. In the second semester (date/times tbc), we'll try quilt making, kintsugi ceramics repair, and quill cutting in relation to the Italian Renaissance drawings exhibition at the King's Gallery.

Most of these sessions can accommodate 10-15 people. This will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Please sign up here for sessions that interest you. I've included a waiting list for each session. All researchers (including PhD students) interested in embodied knowledge materiality, and historical / prehistorical reconstruction are welcome.

Please let Jill (Jill.Burke@ed.ac.uk) know if you sign up but then aren't able to come

Friday 10th Oct, 2.15-4pm. History, Knowledge and Nature: An Urban Forage with Anna Canning. Meet outside the entrance to the Chrystal Macmillan Building.

In the first session of the year, we are starting at root-level, going on an urban forage with a historical bent, led by Anna Canning (Herbology lecturer, Botanic Gardens Edinburgh). Plants are the fundamental form of 'material culture', being the basis of most human-made goods for millennia. Knowledge of plants and their properties was relatively commonplace in the premodern world, yet this knowledge is now comparatively scarce - including among historians. As well as a (hopefully sunny) Autumn walk, this session will prompt us toconsider the resources around us, even in sometimes unpromising urban settings. If the weather is awful, we will switch to a workshop making plant-based remedies in the Historical Reconstruction Lab.

Some reading you can look at if you have time:
Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (2017), Introduction.
Ann-Sophie Lehmann, 'Cube of Wood: Material Literacy for Art History'. Inagural Lecture.

Members of the Centre are involved in a number of research projects that take the study of 'things' as their central concern.

Stephen McDowall, Chineseness in British Visual Culture, c. 1730-1949

This project concerns the ways in which visual signifiers of ‘Chineseness’ functioned in British culture from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries and builds upon previous research with Professor Anne Gerritsen.  Stephen is particularly interested in non-textual sources, including photographs, postcards, advertisements, theatre programmes and other ephemera, and the material practices that give such objects their meaning.  This is the subject of his second book project, and also a significant part of his Honours-level special subject, 'Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds since 1300' (HIST10438). Stephen received a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant in 2017 to support archival research for this project.  

Subaltern Histories of Global Textiles: Connecting Collections, Expanding Engagement

Knitting together material from three collections — Victoria and Albert Museum, London, University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, and the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York — this project re-centers the locus of global textile trade from White Euro-American markets to African diaspora markets. Our aim is to bring historical textiles from museum collections, archival records of textile production and circulation, and information on the use of these textiles in African diaspora communities in the Americas together in an interactive visual format that is easily understood by the public. In linking lesser-known Indian and Indian-imitation textiles as objects that clothed and shaped the lived experiences and identities within those within lesser-studied historical communities of color, this digital humanities project highlights contributions of under-represented communities to global cultures of fashion.

The pilot phase of this project is funded through a Level 1 "New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions" grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The Project Team:

Dr Meha Priyadarshini, University of Edinburgh

Dr Deepthi Murali, George Mason University

Avalon Fotheringham, Victoria and Albert Museum, London


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