CMCS: A History 2000-2020

Founded in 2000 at the University of Delaware (UD), the Center for Material Culture Studies is a national leader in interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration. From grants to symposia, internships to fellowships, CMCS advances research, learning, and public engagement about the wide world of material things. Learn about our history — and explore some of our highlights from 2000-2020!

Material culture is all about things, but people have always been the heart of the Center.

In 1998, a group of UD faculty began to imagine ways of maximizing the university's extraordinary strengths in material culture scholarship, teaching, and collections. Their efforts landed a grant in 2000 from the Unidel Foundation to establish the Center for American Material Culture Studies.

Under the direction of Professor Bernard L. Herman, the Center quickly attracted participation from material culture specialists in many UD departments, disciplines, and organizations, including Anthropology, Art, Art Conservation, Art History, Black American Studies, the Center for Historic Architecture and Design, English, History, Museum Studies, and the Winterthur Museum. Early initiatives focused on students: the Center generated new courses, developed a minor in material culture studies, funded summer internships,  collaborated with campus and community partners , and inaugurated an annual symposium that became the leading international forum for emerging scholars of material culture.

The Center expanded its mission in 2007. Major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Unidel Foundation, The Friends of Rockwood, and Peter Finkel and Susan Finkel endowed support for education and internships. English Professor Debby Andrews became the Center director, and Art History Professor Sandy Isenstadt served as Associate Director. The Center initiated an annual summer fellowship program and Institute — PEMCI, renamed DELPHI in 2012 — to train graduate students in public engagement and material culture research. An annual one-credit colloquium introduced a new generation of undergraduates to material culture studies. And CAMC became CMCS, the Center for Material Culture Studies, dropping "American" to reflect the global reach of material culture studies.

Seven years later, in 2014-15, under the co-directorship of Professor Isenstadt and English Professor Martin Brückner, CMCS rolled out a new set of programs, including biennial conferences and an international partnership with Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. A new Honors Colloquium immersed undergraduates in the material worlds of Renaissance literature, Benjamin Franklin, and the Civil War. CMCS developed a new book series and a major digital humanities project, ThingStor. A cluster hire in material culture studies brought four outstanding new faculty to UD, and a biannual grants program began to fund faculty and graduate student research, travel, publications, and collections-based workshops.

CMCS continues to innovate as it looks to a post-pandemic future. In 2022, former CMCS Director Wendy Bellion assumed the role of associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences; new leadership includes English Professor Sarah Wasserman in the Director's chair, Anthropology Professor Carla Guerrón Montero as Associate Director, and an interdisciplinary Advisory Committee (Assistant Professor Catharine Dann Roeber, Decorative Arts and Material Culture in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture; Associate Professor Jennifer Van Horn, Art History and History; Ms. Meghann Matwichuk, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press; Professor Lance Winn, Art and Design). Initiatives include Thing Tank, an annual research forum for faculty and advanced graduate students, and new initiatives for undergraduate engagement. Throughout, CMCS remains guided by its founding commitments to creativity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and experiential learning.

Dozens of UD faculty, staff, and graduate assistants have energized CMCS programs, courses, and scholarship over the years. Meet the faculty who have served as Center leaders!

In November 2002, a handful of UD graduate students gathered at the home of Professor J. Ritchie Garrison and cooked up a plan for a student conference. The following spring, they convened the inaugural Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.

Emerging Scholars has been a highlight of the CMCS calendar since 2003 (the symposium migrated to a biennial format in 2016). It has also become the preeminent international forum for the presentation of new material culture scholarship by graduate students and early career scholars. The symposium is organized and implemented by an interdisciplinary team of UD graduate students in collaboration with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Over 200 individuals have participated in the symposia as invited speakers, commentators, and keynotes.

In 2008, CMCS published  a volume of selected papers presented between 2003-07 . Professor Zara Anishanslin, who formed part of the first organizing committee and is now a CMCS affiliated faculty member, penned the foreword, and Professor Ashley Pigford worked with art students to design the graphics. Hold and move the arrows to scroll between the cover and table of contents.

Emerging Scholars teams have long collaborated with undergraduates in UD's Art Department to produce creative posters and programs for the symposia:

Since 2014, CMCS has organized annual and biennial conferences connecting scholars in material culture studies. CMCS conferences have provided opportunities for participants to share cutting-edge research on timely subjects — and yielded publications forthcoming from the CMCS book series Material Culture Perspectives.

• 2014: "Survivor Objects," exploring the material cultures of trauma, witnessing, and cultural memory. Keynote by Marita Sturken (New York University).
• 2015: "Green Light: Prospects in Lighting Design and Technology," organized in collaboration with UD's Art and Science: Connections and Intersections Initiative. Keynote by Marco Bevolo (designer).
• 2016:  "Objects of Refuge/Refuge of Objects,"  held at Johannes Gutenburg University Mainz, Germany
• 2017:  "Imagined Forms: Modeling and Material Culture," First Biennial CMCS Conference , in collaboration with Hagley Library. Keynotes by Johanna Drucker (UCLA) and Peter Galison (Harvard). A forthcoming book grew out of the conference: Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
• 2019:  "Black Bibliographia: Print/Culture/Art," Second Biennial CMCS Conference , organized in partnership with UD's Special Collections, Morris Library. Keynotes by Tia Blassingame (artist), Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale), and Meredith McGill (Rutgers). Poetry reading: Robin Coste-Lewis. Printer in residence: Amos Kennedy Jr.
• 2022: "Material and Visual Approaches to the Disability Gaze," Third Biennial CMCS Conference.

Public engagement is central to CMCS. Since 2008, the Center has annually offered a summer fellowship program and two-week institute for UD graduate students in material culture studies. Support provided by the NEH has enabled more than 150 UD students to learn essential skills for sharing their research with diverse public audiences.

From 2008-2011, the Institute operated as PEMCI: the Public Engagement in Material Culture Institute. Co-Directors Joyce Hill Stoner (Art Conservation) and Matthew Kinservik (English) developed seminars, workshops, and field studies that introduced Fellows to the interdisciplinary range of material culture studies. Guest speakers provided training in pubic speaking, digital media, and the marketing of their work. Fellows became part of a dynamic cohort committed to public engagement.

In 2012, PEMCI became  DELPHI: the Delaware Public Humanities Institute . Professor Arwen Mohen (History) and Dr. Erik Rau (Hagley Library) served as co-directors for four years. In 2016, they handed the DELPHI baton to CMCS Co-Directors Sandy Isenstadt and Martin Brückner. In 2020, CMCS Co-Directors Wendy Bellion and Sarah Wasserman began leading the Institute.

DELPHI has been enriched continually by the participation of guest instructors from academia, research institutions, nonprofit foundations, community partners, and public media. Recent highlights include workshops on developing e-portfolios, podcasting, accessibility programming, grant writing, and media interviews. DELPHI alumni demonstrate the success of this coaching: graduates have given interviews about their research to outlets including The Washington Post and NBCNews. They have organized major exhibitions and developed educational programs for learners of all ages and abilities.

All DELPHI Fellows put their training to work immediately by presenting their research in an annual course organized by OLLI (the Osher Life Long Institute) in Wilmington. They also develop public engagement projects designed to reach even broader audiences, from K-12 school groups to digital humanities forums.

UD faculty and students are widely recognized for their innovative research in material culture studies. Grants from CMCS help make this work possible. With funding from the NEH, UD's College of Arts & Sciences, the Unidel Foundation, The Friends of Rockwood, and the Finkel Fund, CMCS has awarded grants to more than 120 individuals in support of scholarship, workshops, and internships.  

CMCS offers a variety of research, travel, and presentation grants for UD graduate students. Funding has taken students around the United States and abroad to countries including Canada, England, France, Italy, Scotland, and Spain.

Established in 2014, the Friends of Rockwood Fund honors the service of John Sweeney, Grayce Hess, and Phoebe Loss to the Friends of Rockwood. The biannual award supports graduate students whose research addresses the material culture of the Victorian era. 

Thanks to the generosity of Peter D. Finkel and Susan R. Finkel, CMCS offers support to students pursuing material culture-based internships. Finkel Fund recipients have held internships at institutions ranging from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Havard’s Peabody Museum to the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

CMCS grants also support publications, field-based learning, and, beginning in fall 2020, the Graduate Research Fund in Black and African American Material Culture Studies. Also in 2020, the Center introduced Dissertation Writing Grants for advanced doctoral students whose progress has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Learning about material culture happens on campus and beyond: in collections, on site visits, and in digital spaces.

Since its founding, the Center has sponsored undergraduate and graduate courses, including “Introduction to Material Culture Studies,” “Sociology of Art and Culture,” and “Archives Theory: From Manuscripts to Metaphors.” In 2009, the Center developed a one-credit annual undergraduate colloquium featuring guest lectures on the material cultures of food, war, and other topics. CMCS also collaborates with UD's Honors College to offer first-year colloquia such as “‘The Play’s the Thing’: Material Cultures of English Renaissance Drama." The course lives on as a website,  Ren Things , created by instructor Matthew Rinkevich and his students. Flip through the slideshow below to learn more!

Through digital scholarship, CMCS shares research about material culture with audiences near and far across the internet.

CMCS Co-Director Martin Brückner and a working group of UD students created ThingStor in 2015. ThingStor is an interactive database that enables users to recognize, understand, and conduct new research on historical material objects referenced in works of literature and the visual arts. Over time, ThingStor has developed into a collaborative research project focusing on objects from the long nineteenth century. As the ThingStor archive builds, the database will cross-connect object references with historical contexts, critical analysis, representative illustrations, and other sources.

CMCS Working Groups gather students and faculty together in intellectual communities beyond the classroom. Participants explore timely subjects, invite speakers to campus, share work in progress, and collaborate on material culture projects.

Working Groups 2016-2020:

• Blackness and Publicness, 2020-2021
• Material Culture Pedagogy, 2020-2021
• Methods in Material Culture Graduate Student Working Group, 2020-2021
• Media Old and New, 2016-2017
• Object Fight Club: Graduate Student Working Group, 2016-2017
• Theory, Method, & Pedagogy, 2016-2017
• The  Ese’Eja  People of the Amazon, 2016

 Website: https://www.materialculture.udel.edu/ 

 Twitter @UDMatCult 

 Instagram @udcmcs