BiblioVault - Books about Materials

Choreographies

Tracing the Materials of an Ephemeral Art Form

Jacky Lansley

Intellect Books, 2017

Choreographer Jacky Lansley has been practicing and performing for more than four decades. In Choreographies, she offers unique insight into the processes behind independent choreography and paints a vivid portrait of a rigorous practice that combines dance, performance art, visuals, and a close attention to space and site.

Choreographies is both autobiography and archive—documenting production through rehearsal and performance photographs, illustrations, scores, process notes, reviews, audience feedback, and interviews with both dancers and choreographers. Covering the author’s practice from 1975 to 2017, the book delves into an important period of change in contemporary British dance—exploring British New Dance, postmodern dance, and experimental dance outside of a canonical US context. A critically engaged reflection that focuses on artistic process over finished product, Choreographies is a much-needed resource in the fields of dance and choreographic art making.

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Egypt beyond Representation

Materials and Materiality of Aegyptiaca Romana

Sander Müskens

Leiden University Press, 2017

Egypt beyond Representation develops and applies a new approach to study Aegyptiaca Romana from a bottom-up, Roman perspective. Current approaches to these objects are often still plagued by top-down projections of modern definitions and understandings of Egypt and Egyptian material culture onto the Roman world. This book instead argues that these artifacts should be studied in their own right, without reducing them to fixed Egyptian meanings. This study shows that, while “Egyptianness” may have been among Roman associations, these objects were able to do much more than merely representing notions of Egypt.

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Electromagnetic Mixing Formulas and Applications

Ari Sihvola

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999

The book discusses homogenisation principles and mixing rules for the determination of the macroscopic dielectric and magnetic properties of different types of media. The effects of structure and anisotropy are discussed in detail, as well as mixtures involving chiral and nonlinear materials. High frequency scattering phenomena and dispersive properties are also discussed.

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Entangled Itineraries

Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia

Pamela H. Smith

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted.

Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.

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How Film Histories Were Made

Materials, Methods, Discourses

Malte Hagener

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.

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Ingenuity in the Making

Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe

Richard J. Oosterhoff, José Ramón Marcaida, and Alexander Marr

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which ingenuity acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, charting the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

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Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts

Supplementum to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources

Graham Barrett

Arc Humanities Press, 2024

Materials & Techniques in the Decorative Arts

An Illustrated Dictionary

Edited by Lucy Trench

University of Chicago Press, 2000

In our industrialized society, it is often difficult to imagine how the objects around us are made. How, for example, are triple spirals put into the stem of a wine glass or table tops inlaid with whole landscapes of semi-precious stones? This unique dictionary is devoted to the fascinating materials and techniques used in the decorative arts. Materials range from the exotic to the most basic, from rare stones found only in the mountains of Badakshan, unsavory animal products, and the ground bodies of South American insects to ones as common as sand, clay, and lime.

Compiled by a team of experts, each with an intimate knowledge of his or her subject, the entries are written in clear, accessible language and supplemented by numerous photographs and drawings. Each core material (glass, ceramics, textiles, paper, plastics, leather, metal, stone, wood, and paint) is covered from its raw state through any processing or preparation to various craft stages and finally, to any surface finishing.

Traditionally, the kind of information found in these pages has been passed on from craftsman to craftsman or confined to highly specialized books, and even common terms are often misunderstood. This dictionary makes the subject accessible to all—from art and architectural historians, curators, collectors, restoration specialists, artists, and museum staff to decorators, aficionados, and those who enjoy watching Antiques Roadshow. In short, this book is for all those who are intrigued by the materials and techniques used to create the beautiful objects that surround us.

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Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe

Between Market and Laboratory

Edited by Ursula Klein and E. C. Spary

University of Chicago Press, 2010

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines.

Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

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Materials of the Mind

Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920

James Poskett

University of Chicago Press, 2019

This is not only the first global history of nineteenth-century science but the first global history of phrenology.

Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world—and how the world changed phrenology.

This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is an impressively innovative account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history can help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

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New Materials

Towards a History of Consistency

Amy E. Slaton

Lever Press, 2020

This edited volume gathers eight cases of industrial materials development, broadly conceived, from North America, Europe and Asia over the last 200 years. Whether given utility as building parts, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, or foodstuffs, whether seen by their proponents as human-made or “found in nature,” materials result from the designation of some matter as both knowable and worth knowing about. In following these determinations we learn that the production of physical novelty under industrial, imperial and other cultural conditions has historically accomplished a huge range of social effects, from accruals of status and wealth to demarcations of bodies and geographies. Among other cases, New Materials traces the beneficent self-identity of Quaker asylum planners who devised soundless metal cell locks in the early 19th century, and the inculcation of national pride attending Taiwanese carbon-fiber bicycle parts in the 21st; the racialized labor organizations promoted by California orange breeders in the 1910s, and bureaucratized distributions of blame for deadly high-rise fires a century later. Across eras and global regions New Materials reflects circumstances not made clear when technological innovation is explained solely as a by-product of modernizing impulses or critiqued simply as a craving for profit. Whether establishing the efficacy of nano-scale pharmaceuticals or the tastiness of farmed catfish, proponents of new materials enact complex political ideologies. In highlighting their actors’ conceptions of efficiency, certainty, safety, pleasure, pain, faith and identity, the authors reveal that to produce a “new material” is invariably to preserve other things, to sustain existing values and social structures.

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Organic Sensors

Materials and applications

Eduardo Garcia-Breijo

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017

This book reviews the state of the art in the use of organic materals as physical, chemical and biomedical sensors in a variety of application settings.

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Preliminary Union List of Materials on Chinese Law

With a List of Chinese Studies and Translations of Foreign Law

Harvard University Press

This volume, a list of Chinese studies and translations of foreign law, was prepared for the Subcommittee on Chinese Law of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

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Sensitive Matter

Foams, Gels, Liquid Crystals, and Other Miracles

Michel Mitov

Harvard University Press, 2012

Life would not exist without sensitive, or soft, matter. All biological structures depend on it, including red blood globules, lung fluid, and membranes. So do industrial emulsions, gels, plastics, liquid crystals, and granular materials. What makes sensitive matter so fascinating is its inherent versatility. Shape-shifting at the slightest provocation, whether a change in composition or environment, it leads a fugitive existence.

Physicist Michel Mitov brings drama to molecular gastronomy (as when two irreconcilable materials are mixed to achieve the miracle of mayonnaise) and offers answers to everyday questions, such as how does paint dry on canvas, why does shampoo foam better when you “repeat,” and what allows for the controlled release of drugs? Along the way we meet a futurist cook, a scientist with a runaway imagination, and a penniless inventor named Goodyear who added sulfur to latex, quite possibly by accident, and created durable rubber.

As Mitov demonstrates, even religious ritual is a lesson in the surprising science of sensitive matter. Thrice yearly, the reliquary of St. Januarius is carried down cobblestone streets from the Cathedral to the Church of St. Clare in Naples. If all goes as hoped—and since 1389 it often has—the dried blood contained in the reliquary’s largest vial liquefies on reaching its destination, and Neapolitans are given a reaffirming symbol of renewal.

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Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief

Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America

Edited by Stephen B. Carmody and Casey R. Barrier

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands

Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices.

Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents.

Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas.

Contributors
Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright

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Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits

Lih J. Chen

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004

Silicide Technology for Integrated Circuits focuses on the task of developing and applying metal silicide technology as it emerges from the scientific to the prototype and manufacturing stages and provides guidance on the application of the latest emerging technology.

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Strained Silicon Heterostructures

Materials and devices

C.K. Maiti

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001

This book comprehensively covers the areas of materials growth, characterisation and descriptions for the new devices in siliconheterostructure material systems. In recent years, the development of powerful epitaxial growth techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), ultra-high vacuum chemical vapour deposition (UHVCVD) and other low temperature epitaxy techniques has given rise to a new area of research of bandgap engineering in silicon-based materials. This has paved the way not only for heterojunction bipolar and field effect transistors, but also for other fascinating novel quantum devices. This book provides an excellent introduction and valuable references for postgraduate students and research scientists.

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Thrifty Science

Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment

Simon Werrett

University of Chicago Press, 2018

If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world.

Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

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