Dr Benjamiin Tilghman
Visiting Research Fellow, January - May 2020 and August 2024 - January 2025
Home institution: Washington College
Ben Tilghman is associate professor of art history at Washington College in Maryland. He is also a founding member of the Material Collective, a collaborative working group of medieval art historians that explores innovative and more humane modes of scholarship. His previous research has spanned the art of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods–with special attention to the early medieval British Isles and Ireland–and has explored new approaches to calligraphy, ornament, codicology, and thing theory.
Project title: The Still Lives of Medieval Artworks
Art historical studies of the changing contexts of objects have enriched our understanding of how the use and reception of artworks can change across contexts. These “biographies” often quickly pass over the long stretches of time during which a work stays in one place. But perhaps the stillness of art objects should not be seen as a kind of downtime, but as an essential element in their agency and meaning. This project consists of a book-length exploration of the phenomenon of “stillness” as structural feature of certain artworks, with a special but not exclusive focus on works from the British Isles and Ireland in the medieval period. This project explores how perceptions of stillness and perduration in art objects relates to cultural conceptions of the natural world, divine forces, structures of power, and historical change, and makes the argument that art historians have under-theorized stillness and related concepts as a feature of artworks.
This project is a continuation of Benjamin's Fellowship in 2020, which was cut short due to the Covid pandemic.