Register for CMSMC’s 2026 Symposium: Memory and Material Culture on Saturday, April 11, 2026 at 11am ET (Via Zoom)!

“Animal Materialities” invites papers that center animals as material, epistemological, and political actors rather than symbolic backdrops within human histories. As the field increasingly attends to the agency and ‘thingness’ of objects,  it is equally important to remember that humans do not share the world with things alone. Agency theory, as noted by scholar Jennifer Roberts, refuses, “any absolute ontological distinction between humans and things. Objects are not and never have been separate from and subordinate to humans, but something closer to collaborators.” Animals are as integral to human history as objects, and perhaps even more visibly so, as they possess their own vital agencies that actively shape how they move through and transform the world through their bodies, labor, and byproducts. 

In order to broaden the scope and potential for scholarly inquiry, “Animal Materialities” asks scholars to engage with animals in material culture. What happens to our understanding or interpretation of an object or a work of art when we not only see, but engage, the animal? At the heart of this topic is an assertion that the lives and presence of animals in cultural production is fundamentally related to the history of humanity and as such, deserves due attention in the field.

Our keynote speaker is: TBD.

Our emerging scholar presenters: TBD. Check back after March 18th!

Registration is through Eventbrite and the event will take place via Zoom Webinar.