Call for Papers
University of Delaware’s 8th CMCS Conference in Material Culture
April 2-3, 2027
“What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture”
Keynote Speaker
SUSAN STEWART
(Princeton University)
Long considered a distinctive concern for literary specialists, description in fact informs all the arts and humanities and, no doubt, the natural sciences as well. Any object of inquiry—from texts to paintings to other modes of representation or from raw materials to consumer goods or from stars to dark matter—requires some level of description. While description has been and remains a prominent element of reflective thought, its valence has fluctuated over time, with some thinkers finding description to be paralyzing or pedantic, extraneous, misleading, even deceptive, and generally unwelcome. Others, reflecting on description specifically in relation to material culture studies, theorized description as a kind of second substance through which we make sense of objects, “reality reconstituted,” as T.H. Breen put it, whereas Jules Prown thought that textual description was, inescapably, the thing itself. Such characterizations are all the more promising today for cross-disciplinary conversations as scholars from various fields extend their inquiries to material facets of their respective subjects and, at the same time, parallel attempts to engage material culture within any one specialty provide methodological bridges between disciplines since all such efforts inevitably rest upon a studied translation of matter into language.
The symposium, “What’s the Matter with Description,” welcomes submissions from all disciplines concerned with description and the way it interacts with material culture. Papers should offer new perspectives on questions regarding the powers and practices of description, including–perhaps especially–those times when we take descriptions for granted and let them stand unexamined. For instance, how does the description of an object inform and transform what can be grasped of it? Or, is there a uniquely material culture approach to description, one that takes material agency seriously and presumes an iterative relationship between describer and described?
Topics may include (but are not limited to) to one or more of the following themes:
• Histories of Description
Ekphrasis, Realism, Mimesis, Ut Pictura Poesis and the Imitation of Nature, Word and Image, Drama and Performance, Speech v. Writing, etc.
• Missions of Description
Expeditions, Experiments, First Descriptive Encounters, Taxonomies and Classification, Collecting and Archiving, Laws and other Codes, Memorialization, Education
• Protocols of Description
The Camera Eye, Impressionistic Description, Thick Description, Processual Description, Translation, Rules, Textbooks, Witness and Meditation, Memory and Remembering
• Media of Description
Oral Traditions, Personal Records, Print, Visual Media, Diagrams, Schematics and Maps, Photography and Film, Audio Media, Data Visualization
• Ethics of Description
Observational Objectivity, Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Approaches, Colonial and Imperial Gaze, Reparative Description, Politics of Description
Please send abstracts of max. 300 words, with brief CV of no more than two pages, by July 15, 2026 to Martin Brückner (mcb@udel.edu) and Sandy Isenstadt (isnt@udel.edu). The conference takes place on April 2-3, 2027, at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum, DE.
Contact Information
Martin Brückner
Director of Winterthur Program in American Material Culture
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Contact Email
mcb@udel.edu
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