Centre for the Study of the Body and Material Culture

The focus of the Centre is the history of bodies and their material dimension, and more precisely the study of the changing relationship between the body and the surrounding material world from the Antiquity to the present day. The Centre launched in autumn 2010, and is part of the History Department at Royal Holloway University of London. The Centre brings together scholars of health and intimacy, politics and identity, consumption and urban planning and visual and material culture with the intention of promoting intellectual exchange and collaboration in this new field. The Centre is currently running a seminar series on ‘Fashioning the Body’.

The Centre currently covers a broad range of themes and a wide geographical scope. They include the study of:
- Byzantine medical texts as artefacts and their impact on therapies
- The body in its relationship to the physical environment, especially the disease environment, and to the provision of health care across late antiquity and the Middle Ages
- Changing ideas and practices of healthy lifestyles and salubrious houses in Italy between 1500 and 1700
- The royal and aristocratic body in early modern Europe
- The study of the body as a microcosm of the universe and politics in the Middle Eastern and Islamic perspective
- The material culture of the homes and gardens in Victorian and Edwardian England
- The impact of the design, decoration and furnishing of residential institutional spaces on the experiences of their inmates in early modern Europe and 19th century Britain
- The development of networks for the transmission of goods in modern China
- Middle-class housing and consumption in Muslim South Asia
- The impact of urban development and city planning on people’s experience in post-colonial Pakistan
- Women’s holocaust experiences with particular reference to rape and sexual abuse
- The body and medicine in twentieth-century Britain, especially professional bodies
- The cultural transmission of values and beliefs in memory, especially in relation to the consumption of food
- The origins and development of family photographs and the material and visual cultures of the photographic postcard in modern Britain.

Our seminar theme this year is 'Imbibing Bodies: Histories of Drinking and Culture'

See our seminar webpage for further details.