Caltech’s Visual Culture Program presents “Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags,” an online discussion featuring Hanna Rose Shell, Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History at Caltech, from 4 to 5 p.m. Thursday, May 13.
Starting in the early 1800s, “shoddy” was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and marked one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more.
Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. This talk is about why that afterlife matters. It will examine visual and material cultures of textile recycling and their contributions to histories of science, technology, and medicine.
Shell argues second-hand clothing is a vital medium — simultaneously visual and material, embodied and inanimate. Sources include literary and historical publications from the 19th and 20th centuries. Most vital, however, are the visual and material sources: from military uniforms to mattress labels, from medical illustrations to political cartoons, to some of the best-known photographic documents in American history.
Shell is currently associate professor at the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at University of Colorado-Boulder, and is a faculty affiliate in the Department of History and the Program in Intermedia, Writing, and Performance.
Her latest book, released in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press, is “Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags.” It examines recycled textiles as transformative media, providing an innovative and interdisciplinary material history of used clothing and dovetails with a series of experimental documentary shorts and a textile installation in the Czech Republic on the subject of waste, recycling and old clothes.
Shell’s previous book, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance,” was published by Zone Books in 2012, and has since been translated into French. “Hide and Seek” has inspired her own and other multimedia works around the world.
Prior to her coming to Boulder in 2018, Shell was an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Leo Marx Career Development Chair, and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She also taught previously at the Rhode Island School of Design.
To RSVP for the free event, visit http://bit.ly/CHVC2021.
For more information, call (626) 395-4652.
Caltech’s Visual Culture Program is administered by the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
