Enfilade

The Material Culture Workshop schedule for the current term:

Cambridge Material Culture Workshop, Lent 2026

We’re delighted to share our Lent 2026 term card. Each of the four sessions will meet online and in-person at St. John’s, Cambridge, starting at 5pm. For more information, please contact Tomas Brown (tbnb2@cam.ac.uk) or Sophia Feist (stcf2@cam.ac.uk). In addition to our talks this term, the Material Culture Workshop is hosting an exhibition tour of Tudor Contemporary at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, on Friday, 13 March, led by curator Dr. Christina Faraday and artist and academic Dr. Jane Partner. This is sign-up only, so send us an email if you’d like to attend.

Monday, 9 February
• Jordan Mitchell-King (De Montfort), The Significance of Getting Dressed for Elite Women in the 18th Century
• Charlotte Stobart (Cambridge), Technological Embodiment: Examining Experiences of Calliper Usage among British Polio-disabled Individuals, 1950–2025

Friday, 20 February
• Laura Granda-Mateu (Edge Hill), Binding Worlds: Women’s Albums and Transnational Material Practices
• Ella Gaskell (York), Sanctified Materiality and the Dormition Icon in Post-Iconoclastic Byzantium

Monday, 9 March
• Joe Clarke (Cambridge), Sa(l)vage Anthropology: Wynfrid Duckworth and the Lost Cambridge Anatomy Museum
• Charlotte Wood (Cambridge), Natural Objects of Affection: Emotion, Materiality, and the Care of Museum Specimens in the Making of Wildlife Conservation Mentalities in Colonial East Africa

Friday, 20 March
• Cecilia Eure (Cambridge), Alternative Means of Decorating in Poor and Labouring-Class British Homes, 1600–1800
• Emma Piercy-Wright (Exeter), Small Trifles, Big Ideas: Mother-of-Pearl Trinkets as Enlightenment Transcripts