Widening the range of our digital resources: Object Lessons Archive 2015-2018

As a result of conversations with academic colleagues across the humanities, the library has purchased the Object Lessons Archive 2015-2018, a digital collection of monographs published by Bloomsbury.

The ‘Object Lessons’ series emerged out of The Atlantic Monthly’s heralded short essays and looks in depth at ‘the hidden lives of ordinary things’ from a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches.  Averaging at c.25,000 words, each text focuses on a single topic to offer a fresh and often surprising focus on the materials of the everyday and question the quotidian in a manner that complements the fundamental critical practice of taking nothing for granted.

In addition to being of general interest to anyone involved in cultural studies, and intra-disciplinary research groupings as diverse as the Morgan Centre, the Sustainable Consumption Institute and The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective, the archive offers a virtual complement to the object-focused scholarship and collection-centred teaching activities undertaken at the Rylands. 

As usual in addition to the provision of a general link to the collection, all titles owned in the series are also individually indexed on Library Search. 

The collection features on our Social Statistics and Social Change, Sociology and Materials Science Subject Guides.