CHASE

Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England

Material Witness

Material Witness

Material Witness is an interdisciplinary training programme for the interrogation of physical objects in the digital age.

The prevalence of digital images both online and in exhibition and museum spaces has resulted in the dematerialised object becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Interest in physical artefacts has intensified as a result, both within the academy and across the public sphere. Material Witness acknowledges the centrality of objects across the humanities and offers innovative and cutting-edge training to emerging scholars in a broad range of theoretical and practical methods for interpreting physical objects. A central theme of Material Witness is the mutually enriching relationship between the digital artefact and the ‘real thing’.

Material Witness will provide training for PhD students in techniques and methods for examining the material world. It aims to encourage researchers who come from different disciplines and backgrounds and who study diverse time periods, pre-modern and modern, to share ideas about the relationships between materials and meaning.

Material Witness will comprise five workshops:

Latest workshop

  Material Witness Blog

The sessions are open to:

By registering you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme. A member of the CHASE team or the workshop leader will contact you in due course to confirm that a place has been allocated to you.

If you are allocated a place but can no longer attend, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time (ideally 5 days prior to the workshop/programme) means your place cannot be reallocated and may result in your access to future CHASE training being restricted.

Terms and conditions*

  • By registering below, you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme. A member of the CHASE team or the workshop leader will contact you in due course to confirm that a place has been allocated to you.

  • If you are allocated a place but can no longer attend, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time (ideally 5 days prior to the workshop/programme) means your place cannot be reallocated and may result in your access to future CHASE training being restricted.

Material Witness Blogposts (from previous years)

Featured

27 Jul 2015


Material Witness, material objects, Royal Holloway Picture Gallery, Victorian, Material Culture studies

Nineteenth-Century Graphic Art and Material Culture



Material Witness, material objects, Royal Holloway Picture Gallery, Victorian, Material Culture studies

The Royal Holloway Picture Gallery is a hidden treasure-trove of Victoriana. A vast oblong room with an ornate bas-relief ceiling and walls crowded with epic paintings in gilt frames, it conveys an almost obscene sense of ostentatiousness appropriate to the period. As a small group, we were almost swallowed up by the space and were privileged to be granted exclusive use of it for the day. Dwarfed by the epic grandeur, you would be forgiven for assuming that the picture gallery belonged to a palace. Indeed, the Royal Holloway campus is modelled on the Chateau de Chambord.

by Azelina Flint



Material Witness, material objects, Royal Holloway Picture Gallery, Victorian, Material Culture studies

 

18 May 2015


Material Witness, British Museum Ethnographic Store, artefacts, First-Nation American, Africa, Oceania

First-Nation Artefacts at the British Museum



Material Witness, British Museum Ethnographic Store, artefacts, First-Nation American, Africa, Oceania

To the British Museum Ethnographic Store (on a somewhat shabby street in Haggerston, east London) for a day thinking about the histories of First-Nation American artefacts and the social relations involved in their collection. We arrived to find a smorgasbord of objects spread out on the tables, from Inuit model snowshoes to Mayan pottery and Iroquoian wampum garters and belts.

by Jenny Reddish



Material Witness, British Museum Ethnographic Store, artefacts, First-Nation American, Africa, Oceania

 


Material Witness, University of Kent

Text as Object: Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century



Material Witness, University of Kent

The overlap between textual and material cultures is hardly a new concept. From ages past, when the majority of the population was illiterate, objects have been understood to possess a powerful legibility of their own. And with the simultaneous increase in consumer culture and print dissemination, the written word was often accompanied with a price tag. Words are goods, regardless of their quality. This is pertinently true of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals, and was at the forefront of this workshop’s material and digital witness.

By Christine Davies



Material Witness, University of Kent


11 Mar 2015


Material Witness

Book History at Canterbury Cathedral Library



Material Witness

I have been studying at Kent now for almost five years and have been to Canterbury Cathedral countless times for research, workshops, seminars, carol concerts, and two graduations; I even see it every morning when I eat my breakfast, but I try not to take this familiarity for granted. Approaching the library and archives via Christchurch Gate is always exciting and as I made my way around the cloisters to the Dean’s steps I thought how fitting it was to be examining the material aspects of the written word within a stone’s throw of the site of the cathedral’s medieval scriptorium.

by Stuart Morrison



Material Witness