A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age

About the Author

Laurie A. Wilkie, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Berkeley, USA

John M. Chenoweth, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

Dan Hicks is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, UK. He has published five books including The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (2010) and The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (2006).

William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History, University of Oxford, UK. His most recent book is Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (2018).

Product Description

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us?

The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds.

Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA.
Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set.
General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte