The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware helps to integrate and enhance the University’s rich resources for the creation, study, and conservation of material culture. It promotes the learning from and the teaching about all things people make and the ways people have acted upon the physical and visible world. This is realized in its popular undergraduate minor in material culture studies. It also sponsors interdisciplinary seminars and conferences, including the very successful Symposium for Emerging Scholars, and fosters public understanding of material culture in our community beyond campus, at the state, regional, national, and international levels.

Summer Research Fellowships in Material Culture Studies

Up to twelve ten-week summer fellowships will be awarded to University of Delaware MA and PhD students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences pursuing research in material culture studies, broadly defined to include both the preservation and conservation of objects and the scholarly investigation of the relationship among people, material processes, and objects. Fellowship recipients will participate in a two-week Institute, June 1 – June 12, 2015, during which they will learn a variety of skills for engaging non-specialists through public speaking and digital media. The fellowship funds uninterrupted summer research on participants’ own projects. Click here for more information and for application instructions . . .        ...

Survivor Objects

“Survivor Objects” considers the meanings of material objects that have been tempered by trauma. By bearing historical witness, such objects can come to hold a privileged place in cultural memory and, as a result, play a powerful role for present-day communities. The symposium features faculty, graduate students, curators, and conservation specialists from across the country.  Please see the full program for panel and paper topics. November 14th and 15th, 2014 Clayton Hall Conference Center 100 David Hollowell Drive, Newark, Delaware      “Survivor Objects” is open to the public but registration is required.  The Marriott Courtyard – Newark is offering discounted room rates of $134.00 per night for symposium attendees. Follow this link to book your room now: Group rate: Survivor Objects Room Block. This rate is available only until October 24,...

The Material Culture of War

A Fall, 2014, colloquium sponsored by the Center for Material Culture Studies On the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, this series of talks by faculty, advanced graduate students, and experts from the community provides interdisciplinary perspectives on people and objects during times of armed conflict, declared or not, on the battlefield and on the home front. Topics range widely and include images of war in photographs and other media, health and technology in the organized violence of war, design measures that accommodate those injured during war, victory gardens, uniforms, armor, generals, foot soldiers, bombs, what’s destroyed, what survives. Wednesday 12:30-1:10 Integrated Science and Engineering room 222 MCST299-010: One credit. Pass/Fail. No...
Emerging Scholars Symposium

Emerging Scholars Symposium

Consuming Objects: Negotiating Relationships With the Material World Presented by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Winterthur, Delaware Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library: Saturday, April 12, 2014 Keynote speaker: Wendy A. Woloson Assistant Professor of Digital and Public History at Rutgers University-Camden. This annual symposium, organized entirely by University of Delaware graduate students, provides emerging scholars—graduate students and recent PhDs from a variety of academic disciplines as well as museum professionals—with a venue for interdisciplinary conversations centering on material culture. We encourage discussion across perceived boundaries of discipline, medium, and methodology; past symposia have included scholars and professionals from such fields as anthropology, art history, historical archeology, history, and American studies. Each fall, we welcome paper proposals from graduate students and professionals early in their careers on any topic related to material culture. Consuming Objects: Schedule Emerging Scholars in the News Material Matters: Selected Papers from the 2012 Emerging Scholars...
A Lasting Legacy: Sixty Years of Winterthur Graduate Programs

A Lasting Legacy: Sixty Years of Winterthur Graduate Programs

Commemorating the nation’s most successful university-museum partnership, A Lasting Legacy explores the changing roles of conservation and curatorial scholarship over the past 60 years. For nearly six decades, the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library have guided two groundbreaking graduate programs—the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (begun in 1952 as the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture) and the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (begun in 1974). Arguably, no academic programs have had a greater impact on American museums over the last half century. Read more on Winterthur’s...