International symposium
UD scholars will present research on refugees, material culture
10:27 a.m., April 21, 2016--Twenty-one scholars in material culture from the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum have been invited to present their research at an international symposium in Germany focused on refugees, UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) announced.
The symposium, “The Refuge of Objects/Objects of Refuge,” will be hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany, from Dec. 14-18. Over the past year, the CMCS directors have worked closely with colleagues in Mainz to develop the symposium program and helped to secure funding from German federal and state institutions to support travel for the Delaware delegates.
Global Stories
Fulbright awards
Peace Corps plans
The newly founded Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Universität Mainz has sought to develop a lasting partnership with the Center for Material Culture Studies.
The institute identified UD as a leader in material culture studies and invited faculty and graduate students to share their perspectives on the materiality of refuge across the disciplines, periods and geographies in all the diversity of material objects involved.
The selected participants will present on topics that include Materiality and Religion, Migratory Letters and Prints, Things of Refuge and Keepsakes, Lost and Found Print Culture, The Role of Actor Network Theory and Early Modern Studies, Survivor Objects and Photographs.
The UD delegates, and their affiliations, are:
History — Alex Ames, Michelle Everidge Anderson, Laura Helton (also English) and Jesse Kraft.
English — Martin Brückner (Center for Material Culture Studies co-director), Siobhan Carroll, Jessica Conrad, Laura Helton (also History), Kyle Vitale, Sarah Wasserman and Julian Yates.
Art History — Sandy Isenstadt (Center for Material Culture Studies co-director), Kiersten Mounce and Kaila Schedeen.
Winterthur Program in American Material Culture — Rosalie Hooper, Catharine Dann Roeber and Alexandra Ward.
Preservation Studies — Michael Emmons.
Art Conservation Studies — Debra Hess Norris.
Center for Historic Architecture and Design — Rebecca Sheppard and Cate Morrissey.
CMCS — Natalie Wright (Center for Material Culture Studies).
More about the symposium
In view of recent political events and natural catastrophes that have displaced millions and created international humanitarian crises, the theme of “Refuge” has acquired a new sense of urgency for students and teachers working in the fields related to material culture studies.
Definitions dating back to the great trans-Atlantic migrations of the 17th and 18th centuries have characterized “refuge” in mostly spatio-political terms as insular settings of escape or privilege, as colonial enclaves or post-national territories or as secular or sacred retreats.
Rather than rehearse the spatial premise of these terms, this collaborative symposium reflects historically, methodologically and theoretically on the material dimensions of “refuge,” that is, on of the ways in which objects generate or confound refuge, accompany or encumber refugees and, in short, express the condition of the refuge and the refugee through objects and/or as material experience.