Philosophy and Religion

Cranial shape of skull of sane man compared to skull shape of insane man for phrenology, c. 1810, Paris, France.

Research Resources

Readings on Material Culture

David Morgan, The Thing about Religion (UNC Press, 2021).
D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019).
S. Brent Plate (ed.), Key Terms in Material Religion (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).
Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Annabel Wharton, Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke University Press, 2010).
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2009).
David Morgan (ed.), Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (Routledge, 2009).
W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity (Yale University Press, 1998).
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Sally Promey, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Yale University Press, 1993).
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in History and Theory of Response (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, Second Edition (Routledge, 2017).
Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird (eds.), History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Routledge, 2010).
Daniel Miller, Stuff (Polity, 2009).
Sarah Anne Carter and Ivan Gaskell (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Eugene Halton and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, 1981).
Stephen Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Writing Material Culture History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender, The Gender of Material Culture (Winterthur Press, 1997).
Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, Eds, The Object Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Richard Grassby, “Material Culture and Cultural History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35:4 (Spring 2005), 591-603
Lynn Rainville, Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2014).
Suzanne E. Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Kami Fletcher, “Founding Baltimore’s Mount Auburn Cemetery and Its Importance to Understanding African American Burial Rights,” in Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed, edited by Allan Amanik and Kami Fletcher (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 129-154.
Karla FC Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial (Duke University Press, 2003).
Kami Fletcher, “Long Live Chill: Exploring Greif, Mourning, and Ritual within African American R.I.P. T-Shirt Culture,” in Beyond the Veil: Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying (New York: Bergham, 2021), 208-231.

Archives, Museums, and Online Databases for Research

Journals and Publishing Opportunities

Fellowships and Initiatives

Podcasts

Neil MacGregor, “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” BBC and the British Museum.