The Conference will be hosted by the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff Campus
Please contact Lucinda Matthews-Jones [[log in to unmask]] or Tim Jones [[log in to unmask]] to book.
Material Religion in Modern Britain and its Worlds
This two-day symposium will explore material cultures of religious belief and faith in modern Britain. As Birgit Meyer, David Morgan, Crispin Paine and S. Brent Plate have recently pointed out, studying material objects provides us with an alternative evidence base in the study of modern religious belief (Birgit Meyer et al; 2011). Yet few attempts have yet been made to do so. While many scholars now concede that Britain’s religious landscape is more varied and rich than the narrative of secularisation allows, a tendency remains in the historiography of religion to privilege written sources over material manifestations of religion. This means that all sorts of belief practices have been overlooked. Analysing the material past, we propose, will provide scholars with new and exciting ways of understanding the apparently fraught relationship between modernity and religion.
As Jane Bennett points out, objects are culture constructions and lead active lives in our social and cultural landscape. Religious historians have too often been guilty of adopting an implicitly Protestant binary (set up in opposition to Catholicism) in which words are privileged over objects. Yet everyday cultures of Protestant belief in Britain relied on all kinds of material cultures which sustained religion in an age of uncertainty.
Despite Britain’s ‘official’ Protestant past, we are nonetheless keen to encourage papers which explore religious denominations or groups beyond the official canon and which made up Britain’s multi-faith landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Papers are welcome which consider either formal or informal aspects of religious materiality. We would especially like to encourage papers that consider ‘Britain’s worlds’, including investigations of religious objects in the Empire or commonwealth or geographical locations inhabited by British people.
Conference Programme
Friday 8th June 2012
10.45
Conference Registration opens with Coffee
11.15
Welcome
11.30-1.00
Panel One: Past Visions
Eimir O’Brien, ‘Re-appropriating the Gothic: The Catholic Church and their Consolidation of Power in mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland’.
Timothy Carroll, An ancient modernity: Icons and the revitalisation of Britain’
Richard Irvine, ‘Counterfactual architecture: studies in 'what if?' from England and Gibraltar’
1.00-1.30
Lunch
1.30-3.00
Panel two: Subjectivity, the everyday and material religion
Candace Hoffman-Hussain, ‘‘An exploration of religiosity and home artefacts within British interfaith hybrid coupledom’
Ann Wilson, ‘The material and visual culture of the construction of Irish Catholic identity, 1879 to 1922’’
Amy Whitehead, ‘An English shade of Animism: Contemporary statue devotion and the Glastonbury Goddess Temple’
3.00-3.30
Coffee Break
3.30-4.30
Panel three: Senses and emotions
Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, ‘Compassion - The Stuff of Religion, 1870-1912’
James Mansell, ‘Church Bells and the Acoustic Experience of War in Britain, 1939-45’
4.30-5.30
Keynote Paper
John Harvey (Aberystwyth University) ‘Revival, Restoration, and Revision: An Audio Interrogation of Evan Roberts’ Wax Cylinder’
Saturday 9th June 2012
10.00-11.00
Keynote Paper:
Dominic Janes (Birkbeck College) ‘The Aesthetic Eucharist in Victorian Britain’
11.00-11.30
Coffee Break
11.30-12.30
Panel Four: Church Exteriors and Interiors
Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Sacred Art for the People: G. F. Watts’s Time, Death and Judgment as Material Christianity, 1883-1970’.
Jim Cheshire, ‘Fashioning Church Interiors - the Importance of Amateur Design’
12.30-1.00
Lunch
1.00-2.30
Panel Five: Ritual and Material Religion
Kate Jordan and Ayla Lepine, ‘Adornment and Atonement: Textiles and Labour in Victorian Convents’
Jill Sudbury, ‘Skin as Spiritual Script: Tibetan Buddhism, Tattoos and the West’
Joe Webster, 'Divine Paper, Demonic Plastic and Delicious Prawns: The Immanence of Transcendence in a Scottish Fishing Village'
2.30
Roundtable
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