2023 CHAViC-PHBAC Summer Seminar

Material Religion: Objects, Images, Books

Sunday, June 25- Friday, June 30, 2023

Co-leaders: Sonia Hazard and Christopher Allison

Syllabus

Sunday, June 25 – Welcome & introductions

On this day, participants travel to Worcester, get settled in their lodging, and begin the programming in the afternoon.

• 4:30 – 5:30 pm. Welcome & library tour at Antiquarian Hall (AH), 185 Salisbury Street, with Scott Casper (President, American Antiquarian Society), John Garcia (Director of Scholarly Programs and Partnerships, AAS), Sonia Hazard (Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University), and Christopher Allison (Director, McGreal Center at Dominican University)
• 5:30 – 7 pm. Reception and dinner at the Goddard-Daniels House (GDH),190 Salisbury Street

Monday, June 26 – Material religion in theory and practice

• 9 – 9:15 am. Assemble at Antiquarian Hall (bring two forms of ID for library registration)
• 9:15 – 10:30 am. Seminar 1: “What is material religion?” at the Learning Lab in Antiquarian Hall (LL):

  Readings:

  Sally M. Promey, “Religion, Sensation, and Materiality: An Introduction,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1–21.

  Robert Orsi, "Real Presence," in History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–11.

  Cynthia Hahn, “Introduction: The Eternal Relic,” in The Reliquary Effect (London: Reaktion, 2017), 1–17.

  Christine DeLucia, “Antiquarian Collecting and the Transits of Indigenous Material Culture: Rethinking ‘Indian Relics’ and Tribal Histories,” Common-Place (2017): http://commonplace.online/article/antiquarian-collecting-and-the-transit...

• 10:30 – 10:45 am. Coffee/tea break (GDH)
• 10:45 am – 12:30 pm. Seminar 2: “The materiality of books” (LL)

  Readings:

  Matthew P. Brown, “Hand Piety; or, Operating a Book in Early New England” in Cultural Narratives, ed. Sandra Gustafson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 14–33.

  Phillip Round, “Toward an Indian Bibliography,” and “On the Coming of the Book to Indian Country” in Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010), 5–45.

  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Introduction: An Indignation Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, 1870,” in A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).

  Recommended. Laura Arnold Leibman, “Commonplace Things” in The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2020), 133–167.

• 12:30 – 1:30 pm. Lunch (GDH)
• 1:30 – 3:30 pm. Library/catalog orientation, followed by archival workshop 1 (LL)
• 3:30 – 3:45 pm. Afternoon break (GDH)
• 3:45 – 5:30 pm. Site visit to St. John’s Catholic Church and puritan burial ground (44 Temple St)

Tuesday, June 27 – Art and visual culture

• 9 – 10:30 am. Seminar 3: “Religious art and visual culture” (LL)

  Readings:

  Ned Blackhawk, “The Radical Potential of America’s Indigenous Art History,” in Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2018), 52–62.

  Hans Belting, “An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011 [2001]), 9–36.

  David Morgan, “Pictures and Children,” in Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Reproduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 201–234.

  Recommended. Joseph Leo Koerner, preface, “A Tragedy for Art?” and “The Arrested Gesture” in The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9–18, 28–36, 153–170.

• 10:30 – 10:45 am. Coffee/tea break (GDH)
• 10:45 am – 12:15 pm. Archival workshop 2 (LL)
• 12:15 pm – 1:30 pm. Lunch (GDH)
• 2 – 4:45 pm. Visit to Worcester Art Museum (55 Salisbury St)
• 5:30 pm. Optional evening excursion to a Millerite monument and temple

Wednesday, June 28 – Material entanglements

• 9 – 10:30 am. Seminar 4: “Nonhuman agencies & animacies” (LL)

  Readings:

  Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994), 29–64.

  Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ 17, no. 2-3 (2011), 265–286.

  Recommended. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003), 801–831.

• 10:30 – 10: 45 am. Coffee/tea break (GDH)
• 10:45 am – 12:30 pm. Special seminar on “UnSettlering Indigenous Archives: Toward Practices of Relation, Re-media-ing and Re-membering” with Anthony Trujillo (LL)

  Reading:

  Anthony Trujillo, “Of Dreams, Relatives, Spirits, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard,” Panorama 8, no. 1 (2022): https://journalpanorama.org/article/of-dreams-relatives-spirits/

• 12:30 – 1:30 pm. Lunch (GDH)
• 1:30 – 2:45 pm. Archival workshop 3 (LL)
• 2:45 – 3:00 pm. Group photograph outside Antiquarian Hall
• 3 – 4:45 pm. Reading room research and exploration (AH)

Thursday, June 29 – Ontologies, activations, archives

• 9 – 10:30am. Seminar 5: “Ontological turns” (LL)

  Readings:

  Lorand Matory, Introduction, “The Contrary Ontologies of Two Revolutions,” and “Eshu’s Hat: or an Afro-Atlantic Theory of Theory,” in the Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1–39, 175-190, and 290–324.

  Recommended. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., introduction to Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–31, esp. 1–16.

• 10:30 – 10:45 am. Coffee/tea break (GDH)
• 10:45 am – 12:15 pm. Special seminar on “Archives of Conjure, Inhabited Objects, and Papered Remains: Engaging with Activated Collections” with Dr. Solimar Otero (LL)

  Reading:

  Solimar Otero, “Introduction: Archives of Conjure” and “Residual Transcriptions,” in Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 1–68.

• 12:15 – 1:15 pm. Lunch (GDH)
• 1:15 – 3pm. Archival workshop 4 on “papered remains” (LL)
• 3 – 4:45 pm. Reading room research and exploration (AH)

Friday, June 30 – Presentations and wrapping up.

• 9 – 10:30am. Reading room research and exploration (AH)
• 10:30 – 10:45 am. Coffee/tea break (GDH)
• 10:45 am – 12:15 pm Presentations by participants & group discussion (LL)
• 12:15pm – 1:15. Lunch (GDH)
• 1:15 – 1:30 pm. Applying for AAS fellowships, with Nan Wolverton (LL)
• 1:30 – 3 pm. Presentations by participants & group discussion (LL)
• 3 – 4:45 pm. Goodbyes and/or research in reading room