Peter N. Miller – författare

This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called "antiquarian." As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received---and often very much under conceptualized---use of the term "antiquarian" in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past---and especially the material past---but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

Conservators as first responders in a world where our cultural heritage is increasingly at riskConservation can be understood as a form of knowing; conservators extract meaning about the past from what remains, while noting what is missing and sometimes repairing it. In this erudite and virtuosic book, the historian Peter Miller imagines the outlines of a new, expansive notion of conservation that links the world around us—natural and man-made—to the world inside us—our genome, our memories. Putting the work of conservation into conversation with history, philosophy, and literature yields a shift in perspective. It raises questions central to the work of the humanities: What does time mean? How do we write about knowledge? How does care connect humans not just with the world but also with each other? And where does freedom exist in a world of things? Miller casts conservators as first responders in a world as fragile as the things they work on. He argues that a broader conception of conservation can provide the necessary intellectual resources for grappling with the scale of the enormous challenges ahead. Offering a kind of sketch of a curriculum for that future, Miller suggests that shaping the person of the conservator is as important as shaping the field. For only those trained to think about change through the painstaking labor of preserving and restoring will be able to do the work of policy and advocacy required by our uncertain future.