Material Cultures of Play

Programme

9.30 Arrival and coffee / tea.

10 Jordana Blejmar and Erika Teichert  — Building Blocks, Avant-Gardes, and the Utopian Imagination in Latin America

Jordana Blejmar is Senior Lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Liverpool. She investigates the links between art and politics in Latin America and is currently the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Fellowship ‘Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina’ (2022-2024).

Dr Erika Teichert is a Lecturer in Spanish Studies at University College Dublin. Prior to joining UCD, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. She holds a BA in History of Art from UCL, and an MPhil and PhD in Latin American Studies from Cambridge.

10.45 David Hopkins  — Little Wars: From H.G. Wells to Jake and Dinos Chapman.

David Hopkins is Professor Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in Dada and Surrealism and post-war art and theory. His books include Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (Yale University Press, 2021). He is joint editor of Hygiene, Contagion and the Avant-Garde shortly to be published by Routledge.

11.30 coffee / tea break

11.50 Matthew Fitzjohn & Peta Bulmer  — Unearthing playtime in Classical Greece

Matthew Fitzjohn is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. His research is primarily focused on the archaeology of the classical world (early Greece and Italy).

Peta Bulmer is an Honorary Research Fellow in Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool.  specialising in burial practices and social change in Late Bronze Age Greece.  She and Matthew are   collaborating to explore the materiality of childhood and play in Classical Greece.

12.35 Joe Moshenska  — Iconoclasm as Child’s Play: Dolls and Idols in Early Modern England

Joe Moshenska is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow of University College.  He is the author of four books: Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England; A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby; Iconoclasm as Child’s Play; and Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton.  He is a former BBC New Generation Thinker, and the current president of the International Spenser Society.

1.20 Lunch

14.15 Peter Buse — Photography and Play 

Professor Peter Buse (University of Liverpool, School of the Arts) is the author of numerous articles on the history of photography, as well as The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago UP, 2016).

15.00 coffee / tea break

15.15 Luca Csepely-Knorr and Amber Roberts — Towards a Total Environment’ - Michael Brown and the playscapes of post-war public housing

Professor Luca Csepely-Knorr is Chair in Architecture at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, landscape architecture and urban history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is leading the AHRC funded 'Women of the Welfare Landscape' project. 

Dr Amber Roberts is Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. Her current research projects span both current practice and the history and theory of landscape architecture. Amber's research has been funded by Dumbarton Oaks, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Landscape Institute Scotland, École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage and the Museum of English Rural Life. 

16.00  Ben Highmore — The Camberwell playground experiment 1948-51: An infrastructural approach 

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex and is currently writing a book on postwar playgrounds to be published by Reaktion in 2024. His other publications include Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late Twentieth Century Britain (Manchester UP, 2023), The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope From Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (Yale UP 2017) and Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics (Routledge 2017).

Reception:

5pm. School of the Arts Library.