Collections in Flux: the dynamic spaces and temporalities of collecting
May 9-10, 2014
Organizers: Adriana Craciun (UC Riverside) and Mary Terrall (UCLA)
Location: UCLA Clark Library
This interdisciplinary conference explores how collections shift their meanings and uses with motion through time and space, as well as how layers of meanings can inhabit a single collection in a specific time and place. We hope to bring new light to bear on how spaces of display and representation mapped onto geographical and political spaces, and how concerns about permanence and stability shaded rapidly into dissolution and reorganization and, sometimes, re-use. As “Collections in Flux” will demonstrate, the activity of collecting becomes more than the expression of curiosity, the desire for order, or the policing of boundaries. Collections in flux, considered dynamically and globally, through the agency of Europeans and indigenous people, can become a forum for rethinking the relation of centers to peripheries, of alien and native, of exotic and mundane.
Keynote Speakers:
Miles Ogborn, Professor and Head of School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University
Conference Participants:
Malcolm Baker, UC Riverside
Adriana Craciun, UC Riverside
Lucia Dacome, University of Toronto
Alessa Johns, UC Davis
Stacy Kamehiro, UC Santa Cruz
Mi Gyung Kim, North Carolina State University
Stacey Sloboda, Southern Illinois University
Mary Terrall, UCLA
Conference details and registration information will be available on the webpages of the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library. This conference is organized in collaboration with the University of California Multi-campus Research Group on “The Material Cultures of Knowledge, 1500-1830.”