This seminar explored material objects or “things” from a wide variety of historical perspectives.  It examined the historical significance of many different kinds of material objects, including commodities and precious metals, property and money, art and household furnishings, clothing and jewelry, weapons and technological devices, religious relics and icons, books and newspapers, food and drugs, and biological artifacts.  It inquired into the cultural, social and economic meanings that these objects acquired in specific times and places, and how those meanings changed as the objects “travelled” through society and across space and time.  It probed the representation of things in rituals, literature, and art and the display of things in public and private spaces.  It examined the production, distribution, consumption, destruction, and fetishization of material objects.  It explored the question of materiality itself and how to write its history.  It brought together cultural and social historians, economic historians, historians of technology, historians of material culture, historians of art, and scholars from a variety of other disciplines who examine material objects. It sought to advance our understanding of the historical life of things in ways that are empirical, comparative, transnational, and conceptual.

*Because they were unpublished, VHS papers on The Historical Life of Things were distributed in hardcopy form only at Vanderbilt. Please contact the authors for more information on papers. You may link to their faculty page or individual seminar posters below.

Vanderbilt History Seminar 2009–2010 participants:

Leor Halevi, Vanderbilt University
Imperial Commodities and the Search for a Modern Islam: The Fatwas of Rashid Rida, 1903–1935

Daryle Williams, University of Maryland
A Paradox of People and Things in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Slave Society

Judy Kertész, North Carolina State University
"All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones": Collecting Family History, Narrating Dispossesion

Dan Usner, Vanderbilt University
Crafting a Traditional Community in Progressive America: Chitimacha Indian Basket Weavers, 1880–1940

Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University
The Material Culture of Maroons: Case Studies from 17th-Century Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico

Samuel Kline Cohn Jr., University of Glasgow
The Rennaisance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Testaments

Lynn Festa, Rutgers University
Crusoe's Island of Misfit Things

Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University
Owning Things

Dror Wahrman, Indiana University
The Collier Obsession: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age

Sven Beckert, Harvard University
The Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
The Resonance of Strings, and the History of Being

Leora Auslander, University of Chicago
A Jewish Sensorium? Material Culture and Embodiment in Germany, 1890–1930

Julia Phillips Cohen, Vanderbilt University
The Stuff of Empire: Orientalism, Ottomania, and the Jews of the Levant

Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute fo the History of Science and the University of Chicago
Shmoo Fetishism: A Short History of Projection