The Pioneer America Society: Association for the Preservation of Artifacts & Landscapes (PAS: APAL) announced the recipient of its 2011 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award. The award went to David Jaffee of the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, & Material Culture, New York, New York, for A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America. The book was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010.
The Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, established in 1989 by PAS: APAL, honors the work of Fred B. Kniffen, a long-time scholar at Louisiana State University. The Kniffen Award recognizes the best-authored book in the field of North American material culture.
The full list of PAS: APAL award winners is available at H-Material Culture
The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the 10th Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars. The conference Material Matters, will be held at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library on April 14, 2012.
Focus: Object-based research has the potential to expand and even reinvent our understanding of culture and history. In honor of the tenth anniversary of the MCSES, we seek a broad range of papers from emerging material culture scholars. Whether exploring the latest theories, viewing existing material through a new lens, or reinterpreting standing historical conversations with an object-based focus, proposed papers should exemplify the possibilities in material culture research. In exploring these material matters, we hope to promote an interdisciplinary discussion on the state of material culture studies today.
Participants will have the opportunity to tour Winterthur’s collection of early American decorative arts and engage in a roundtable discussion on April 13. Travel grants of up to $300 will be available for presenters.
Submissions: The proposal should be no more than 300 words and should clearly indicate the focus of your object-based research, the critical approach you take toward that research, and the significance of your research beyond the academy.
Deadline: Proposals must be received by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 16, 2011.
For more details, please visit the conference website.
(From H-AMSTY & University of Delaware Material Matters website)
I decided in high school that I wanted to study history and use it in the museum field. This was at a time when there were few museum studies programs around and, at least in my small high school in western Pennsylvania, little guidance to how to go about getting work in museums. I grew up around antiques, my mom called her decorating style “early attic,” and I understood in a general sense that objects connect us to history.
During my undergraduate years I started to investigate museums and who worked there and I discovered a diverse population. What puzzled me at the time was how few people had degrees in history, even though they worked in history museums. I was perplexed. How are you supposed to express accurate historical information to the public if you don’t know how to judge what comes from reliable sources or know how to do scholarly historical research? This is what concerned me in my early years.
Unidentified woman c.1910 in c.1850s clothing, photograph by Charles Byerly of Frederick Md. Collection of the Historical Society of Frederick County.
With the growth of museum studies programs within or associated with university history departments, my concerns over the application of proper historical methods have been, for the most part, relieved. But now I have another nagging issue. What about connoisseurship? In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was called being an antiquarian. It is the deep knowledge about the material culture of the past that comes from studying and collecting objects.
Talking to friends who’ve matriculated in museum studies and perusing the course offerings and requirements from a randomly selected sample of museum studies programs, I note the absence of anything resembling lessons in material culture. I also found it interesting that two of the most well known and noted museum studies programs, the Cooperstown Graduate Program and the University of Delaware/Winterthur program have extensive offerings of courses relating to the study of material culture.
I’m not saying that the courses in museum ethics, collections management, exhibition creation, etc. offered by museum studies programs are not needed. Indeed, they certainly are. However, I see the potential for these programs turning out people who may have a strong grasp of methodology, policy and theory but have no idea how to tell if the federal style side chair they just received as a donation is from an early 19th century craftsman’s workshop or from Ethan Allen .
You might say, not all museum studies students will become curators, some will go into registration, education, or management. I can argue that material culture knowledge is important in all of these positions regardless of whether you end up working at the Met or in a small local history museum. After all, the vast majority of history museums exist to collect, preserve and interpret the material culture of the past. When you get down to it, it is all about the stuff. If you don’t have the tools to identify and authenticate objects or to express why the objects are significant and valuable to our shared historical experience, what will visitors to your museum learn?
