Paul Craddock and Anna Harris have co-written and co-produced a video article examining academic and craft workshops as places of embodied experimentation and learning. Workshopping: Exploring the Entanglement of Sites, Tools, and Bodily Possibilities in an Academic Gathering is an experiment in the video article form, combining text and audio-visual information.  Film is used to…

For centuries, knowledge about arts and crafts has been passed on from generation to generation. But what role do instructive texts play in that process? On 29 June, Ph.D. Thijs Hagendijk  MSc will defend his dissertation on this subject, entitled Reworking Recipes. Reading and Writing Practical Texts in the Early Modern Arts. Practical knowledge in writing In…

Bachelor students at Utrecht University have developed Taste of Time to discover forgotten, traditional Dutch recipes and show you how to make them. The project is part of the Living Pasts course, in which students get the opportunity to uncover the rich history of Utrecht, using raw historical data. The first video of Taste of Time…

The Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org) celebrates the publication of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, a remarkable sixteenth-century manuscript held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The manuscript contains over 900 recipes for making art objects, medical remedies, and…

If you are interested in contributing, please submit an abstract (300 words maximum) via email by 30 March 2020. Click here to go to the website of the conference,which will take place from 25-28 November 2020 at the University of Amsterdam. Organizers: Caroline Jeffra (University of Amsterdam), Richard Thér (University of Hradec Kralove), Chase Minos, and Roeland…

We welcome paper abstracts to the panel track Alternative Knowing Spaces (track no. 5) at the 4S/EASST Conference in Prague, from 18 – 21 August 2020. This open panel focuses on how alternative ways of knowing are practiced in a variety of disciplinary, cultural, regional and historical contexts. What do ‘knowledge’ and ‘discursivity’ mean in…

Cabinet, Elaboratory, Gallery 1500-1800 – The Preservation of Art and Material Culture in Europe and Beyond This one-day conference will take place on Friday the 24th of July 2020, at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford. The Selection Committee invites the submission of a 500 word abstract for a 20-minute paper…

A recently published book review on Michael H. G. Kuijpers’s book An Archaeology of Skill: Metalworking Skill and Material Specialization in Early Bronze Age Central Europe, which might interest anyone interested in understanding craftsmanship, and craft in archaeology, regardless of the medium, and how craft is intertwined with social structure and for those working in experimental or…

Archeologist Christina Petty (CA) recently published the article Working with Artisans; The ‘It Depends’ Dilemma in which she reflects upon the ‘Well, it depends …’-response many academic researchers receive on their results and theories when working closely with artisans. Read the full article here.

** Application deadline is on Monday 15 Dec. 2019 ** Intvitation to participate in the Fourth International Seminar on the Material Culture in the History of Phisics, which will take place from March 2nd – 6th 2020 at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Usually historians work in archives with historical documents trying to reconstruct theories…