Elusive Archives

Material Culture in Formation
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64453-224-9
Verlag: University of Delaware Press

Buch, Englisch, 316 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 680 g

Reihe: Material Culture Perspectives

The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed, or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds the disparate things studied here together are the questions the authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor.

This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized, and even displayed rather than “discovers” artifacts in an archive and asks how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, building toward a new way to think about material culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brückner, Martin

Isenstadt, Sandy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Design Produktdesign, Industriedesign
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Museumskunde, Materielle Kultur, Erinnerungskultur

Über Autor(innen)

MARTIN BRÜCKNER is the director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and a professor in the English department at the University of Delaware in Newark. His books include The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860, winner of the 2018 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, International Society for Landscape, Place, & Material Culture, and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, winner of the 2007 Louis Gottschalk Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Editor of two volumes, Early American Cartographies and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (with Hsuan L. Hsu), he recently launched the digital humanities project, Thingstor.org, a material culture database for finding objects in literature and visual art. He has received fellowships recognizing his work from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
 
SANDY ISENSTADT is a professor and chair of the art history department at the University of Delaware in Newark, where he teaches the history of modern architecture, concentrating on developments in Europe and the United States, but also including the global spread of modernism. His writings span post-World War II reformulations of modernism by ÉmigrÉ architects, urban planning rhetoric and visual strategies, histories of refrigerators, picture windows, landscape views, electrification and urban lighting, the history of shopping, consumer design and marketing, real estate appraisal, and the work of various modern and contemporary architects. His most recent book, Electric Light: An Architectural History, is the first sustained examination of the architectural spaces generated by the introduction of electric lighting. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, in Washington, D.C.