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Understanding of questions on historic material culture

The material turn has received little attention in the science of history. A little later than the linguistic turn or the related iconic turn it was developed in the 1990ies and, by nature, offers particular opportunities in terms of interdisciplinarity: e.g. between ethnology, archaeology, art history and, for that matter, also history. 

After all, research was conducted on historic material culture – albeit in other or narrower contexts – even before the cultural turn: like in traditional form in the so-called “material remains“, in the sphere of social history in the so-called Annales School, as well as in Austrian medieval studies. Researching “things“ past came back in the form of a material turn via the more recent sciences which are globalised and much more interconnected, in particular historical anthropology – and on top of that it became the re-turn to the material field. In the course we will therefore use texts to shed light on that theoretical change and try to ‘read’ selected historical artefacts with new eyes.

Reading and discussion, short presentation, field trip 

Regular active participation, presentation of texts, short essay

M. C. Beaudry/D. Hicks (Hgg.), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010. – Europäische Sachkultur, Gedenkschrift, 1980.