Events
The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective regularly hold events which play host to key speakers in our field of work.
Please regularly check this page to discover what events are coming up and for information on how to attend.
Upcoming Events
Artisan Epistemologies, Material Imaginaries: Making and Knowing Insights with Professor Pamela Smith (6 May 2026, 4pm)
Abstract
Over the course of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, artists and artisans increasingly produced writings about their practice. An intriguing late sixteenth-century anonymous manuscript, Ms. Fr. 640 (now held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France), collects together over 900 “recipes” for objects of art, technology, and everyday use. In 2020, the Making and Knowing Project released Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France, an open-access digital edition and English translation of this manuscript. The technical and artistic instructions contained in Ms. Fr. 640 provide opportunities to explore the meanings and conceptualization of making and materials in early modern Europe, and shed light on the embodied knowledge of handworkers, showing how the work of making was (and is) a form of knowing. This lecture will review results from the Making and Knowing Project’s research and teaching in the lab, classroom and the field over the last decade.
Biography
Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org [makingandknowing.org]). Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. She led the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France [edition640.makingandknowing.org] (2020), and is now working on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.
Past Events
The Manchester Material Culture Lab ‘Material Approaches to the Study of the Body’ Reading Group (2025)
Hosted by The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective
Queer Bodies in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Britain (2025)
Organised by Ben Jackson, Emma Merkling, James Metcalf and Noelle Gallagher
Affective Artefacts (2024/25)
Organised by Sasha Handley, Stefan Hanß, and Rachel Winchcombe
Animals in the Archive
Organising Committee: Leah Astbury, Clara Dawson, and Catherine Evans
Affective Artefacts (2024)
Organised by Sasha Handley, Rachel Winchcombe and Stefan Hanß
‘The Early Modern Transnational Book Conference: Printing, Translation, and Reading, 1500–1800’ (2024)
28–29 May 2024, organised by Seren Morgan-Roberts and Ellen Sophie Werner
Albrecht Dürer’s Material World: Print Culture in Focus (2024)
with Jeanne Nuechterlein, Ulinka Rublack, and Alexander Marr, organised by Edward Wouk, Sasha Handley, and Stefan Hanß
Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Bodies, Emotions, Material Culture (2024)
16 January 2024, lecture by Gary Ferguson (Virginia) with a response by Holly Fletcher (Manchester)
Conversion, Emotions, and Sexuality in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2023)
29 November 2023, with Eric Dursteler and Stefan Hanß
Society for Renaissance Studies Book Launch ‘Narrating the Dragoman’s Self in the Veneto-Ottoman Balkans’ (2023)
with James Amelang (Madrid), Alex Bamji (Leeds), Eric Dursteler (Brigham Young), Stefan Hanß (Manchester), and Aslı Niyazioğlu (Oxford),
Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University), Embodied Knowledge and Texts in Early Modern Europe (2023)
cancelled, 31 October 2023
The Manchester Material Culture Lab (2023)
Symposium Albrecht Dürer’s Material World (2023)
Organised by Sasha Handley on behalf of the Australian Research Council-funded research project ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Material World’
Annual Meeting for Medieval and Early Modern Studies North West (2023)
Organised by Ingrid Rembold
Food Knowledges in the Early Modern World (2023)
Organised by Rachel Winchcombe
Affective Artefacts (2023)
Organised by Stefan Hanß, Sasha Handley and Rachel Winchcombe
The Manchester Material Culture Lab (2022)
Compassion & Care (2023)
Co-organised by Kate Gibson
Integrated Objects (2022)
Co-organised by Florrie Badley and Niels Weijenberg
Friends of the Whitworth Fundraising Event ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance’ (2022)
Roundtable with Dr Edward Wouk, Professor Sasha Handley, and Dr Stefan Hanß
Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe (2022)
Co-organised by Holly Fletcher
Affective Artefacts (2021-22)
Organised by Stefan Hanß and Sasha Handley
Legacy: Textile Studies, the Past Informing the Present (2021)
Early Textiles Study Group Conference, organised by Cordelia Warr
Affective Artefacts (2020-21)
Organised by Stefan Hanß and Sasha Handley
Microscopic Records: The New Interdisciplinarity of Early Modern Studies (2020)
Affective Artefacts (2019-20)
Organised by Stefan Hanß and Sasha Handley
Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael and the Image Multiplied (2016-17)
Exhibition at The Whitworth Art Gallery organised by Edward Wouk and David Morris
Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World (2016)
Exhibition at The John Rylands Library organised by Dr Jenny Spinks and Professor Sasha Handley
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+44 (0) 161 306 6000
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+44 (0) 161 306 6000
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