By Juliette Huygen

 

The VU Art and Culture group and Research Institute CLUE+ present:

Material and Visual Culture Turn: Past and Present

Dr. Dan Hicks (Oxford University/Pitt Rivers Museum)

 

This lecture is part of the seminar :

Trending Topics: Key Ideas/Thinkers in Material Culture Studies

Date:     February 16

Time:     10:00-12:00

Venue:  Vrije Universiteit, Main Building,

room 06A00

The first lecture of the series introduces some of the key moments in the development of material and visual culture studies, especially in relation to the museum.

The lectures are public and free of charge. Please register for the lecture via this link: www.eventbrite.com/e/material-and-visual-culture-turn-past-and-present-dan-hicks-tickets-42671620967

 

 

In the spring of 2018, Prof. dr. Wayne Modest will explore, together with three international guests, some of the key thinkers and ideas that have shaped the increasingly popular field of material culture studies.

Since the 1970s, material culture studies has developed as a robust interdisciplinary field of enquiry, dedicated to the exploration of the meaning of things and their role in constituting our social and cultural worlds. Over three lectures, the series will introduce the main theoretical and methodological perspectives within the field, highlighting how material culture studies has influenced approaches to issues as diverse as power, consumption, taste and style.

Since the 1970s, material culture studies has developed as a robust interdisciplinary field of enquiry, dedicated to the exploration of the meaning of things and their role in constituting our social and cultural worlds. The field has developed along different traditions, in the USA and UK for example, and has affected a range of other disciplines such as (art) history, anthropology, and design and fashion studies in different ways.

We will explore the early histories of material-based anthropology, associated for example with the British School of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, through to Gell’s influential work Art and Agency, and the group of scholars that developed the Journal of Material Culture Studies. We will examine what has been described as the material turn in the social sciences and the humanities, and the now popular areas of inquiry such as ANT, New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, interested in the study of nonhuman agency.

 

Dan Hicks is Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology, Curator of Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College.  He teaches in Archaeology, Anthropology, and History of Art and supervises doctoral students in the fields of historical archaeology, material culture studies, and contemporary archaeology.

 

Dan’s research explores the connections between Archaeology and Anthropology, and falls across three inter-connecting fields: The archaeological study of the recent past (including world historical archaeology and contemporary archaeology); the theoretical and applied study of material culture (including museum collections and the history of archaeology and anthropology); and the archaeology and anthropology of landscape and heritage in comparative perspective.

 

 

The next lecture, THINGS, INTERRUPTED Towards an Anthropological Theory of Hoarding by Dr. Fabio Gygi (SOAS), will be on March 16^th