MAVCOR Journal

MAVCOR Journal is an open access born-digital, double blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to promoting conversation about material and visual cultures of religion. Published by the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University and reviewed by members of our distinguished Editorial Board and other experts, MAVCOR Journal encourages contributors to think deeply about the objects, performances, sounds, and digital experiences that have framed and continue to frame human engagement with religion broadly understood across diverse cultures, regions, traditions, and historical periods.

A special issue guest edited by Laura Levitt and Oren Stier (coming soon! Below is a preview only and not yet accessible to the public)

A closed brown leather-bound book, measuring just over 2cm Object Narratives “The book is small so it can be hidden”:
Leia Kreimer’s Tiny Book from the Vapniarka Concentration Camp
Barbara Mann

“The book is small so it can be hidden.” How, could such a small item have survived the conditions of the camp? And why was it preserved? What did its survival mean? A book is generally considered a non-essential personal item. That is, unlike clothing, or artifacts related to food, shelter or safety, books do not appear to fulfill essential human needs. And yet, even within the extreme conditions of life in the camps, people chose to keep and—in some cases—create books. Leia Kreimer’s tiny book, made for her as a gift, is one example. Its production, exchange, and ultimate survival illuminate the enduring resilience of the book as a cultural form that is both text and object.

Lilly Lax Wedding Dress, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Essays Wedding Dresses: Soft Landings, a Ritual Garment, and the Promises and Perils of Life After Laura Levitt

In 2014, when the author first visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s original offsite storage facility, they saw a semblance of a series of wedding dresses under wraps, too delicate to be on display. In that dark space, the author came to learn about how one of these wedding gowns was made out of a repurposed parachute. So enchanted and intrigued by this story, the author vowed to return to these dresses and their promise of renewed life at least for some of those former concentration camp inmates who survived and were able to wear them.

Photo of an open page in Pál Szegö's diary Essays Two Layers of Text, Many Layers of Meaning: The Materiality of the Pál Szegö Diary Emily Klein

This article conducts a codicological analysis of Szegö’s Holocaust diary written in a holy book, examining the manuscript as an object and the significance of its material features. While the diary entries are a rich text that deserve more scholarly attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries is equally important. Doing so foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

Book of Jewish prayers and blessings belonging to Beatrice Muchman Conversations A Conversation with Holocaust Survivor Beatrice Muchmann Suzy Snyder

For over 30 years, Susan Goldstein Snyder was an acquisitions curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, retiring in 2024. One of the first collections she acquired was donated by Beatrice "Trixie" Muchman who survived in hiding in Belgium. Throughout Susan's tenure at the USHMM, she would meet almost yearly with Trixie who continues to be actively involved and supportive of the USHMM. On March 15, 2024, Suzy Snyder interviewed Beatrice Muchman over Zoom.

Cover Page of Beatrice Muchman’s missal and mass card Essays Sacred in Function, Sacred in Memory: A Rosary and Missal from the Holocaust Robert M. Ehrenreich, Suzy Snyder, and Jane E. Klinger

This article examines a rosary and missal. These objects were given to a Jewish Holocaust survivor for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town as a child. Although the survivor returned to her Jewish faith, she still revered the objects, as demonstrated by her decision to keep them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for safekeeping. In this article, the authors explore these multiple layers of sacredness. They also consider how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

The Iwasaki bag with its archive of family documents Essays Transporting the Past: Suitcases, Briefcases, and Histories of Displacement Koji Lau-Ozawa

The suitcase’s proximity to migrants and the ability of museum visitors to intrinsically connect the images of suitcases to people make them ideal for teaching, speaking, and understanding histories of movement. However, the materiality of such items is less discussed. Suitcases, and their smaller cousins, the briefcase, hold things. They are both object and container, possessing a range of physical properties and material connections. Such items are also inherently material in their demands for care and curation, creating challenges for institutions that hold them to make sense of pasts of violence and trauma. 

Greta Perlman's bracelet, featuring many pendants of different sizes Essays Objects of Witness: Holocaust Jewelry Constructed in Camps and Ghettos Audrey Kim

In comparison to the considerable scholarship on drawings, prints, and photographs of Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners, the jewelry that prisoners created for themselves or other prisoners remains less investigated. Using a bracelet owned by Terezín prisoner Greta Perlman, jewelry constructed by Terezín prisoner David Grunfeld for fellow inmates, and various link bracelets and pins found in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto after its liquidation, this essay examines how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted some form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

Detail of Maria and Maximilian Wortman's letter from the Umschlagplatz to their relative, Ludwik Essays From the Umschlagplatz to The Wiener Holocaust Library: Maria and Maximillian Wortman’s Last Letters Christine Schmidt

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated; they also wrote to a relative, Ludwik, whom they hoped might deliver Dziunia’s letter. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper, a list no larger than 11 x 15 cm. 

Examples of objects held by the Arolsen Archives, including a brown envelope, a selection of pens, rings, pennies and a chain. Essays In(ani)mate Objects: Between the Sacred and the Everyday Dan Stone

Objects shape and legitimate human identity, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. In this article, Stone compares and contrasts how the Arolsen Archives (AA, Bad Arolsen, Germany) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM, Washington, DC) treat the objects in their possession. Stone picks up Ewa Domańska’s claims about how things should be incorporated into history and consider how the ways in which USHMM and AA treat objects leads to different sorts of knowledge about the past, and what this treatment of objects tells us about contemporary understandings of Holocaust museum curatorship and Holocaust memory.

Volume 9: Issue 1
A double notched butterfly bannerstone Constellations On the Multiple Lives of Bannerstones: Indigenous North America 6,000 BCE to the Present Anna Blume

Looking at Indigenous bannerstones from what is known as North America, their unique shapes and symmetrically drilled holes carved from an array of lithics, from sedimentary stone to quartz, I wonder what stories they are telling. Do their stories begin with the sculptors who made them east of the Mississippi Valley in 6,000 BCE or do they begin four billion years ago when volcanic heat from the earth’s core melted and congealed minerals to form the oldest terrestrial rocks?

A reddish hued temple is shown brightly illuminated by sunlight against a clear blue sky. Essays In Search of Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist Past and Present: Religious Heritage, History, and Identity in Modern Beijing Benjamin J. Nourse

Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist temples have always been places through which diverse groups of people moved. During the Qing, these were spaces where elites from different backgrounds met, collaborated, and enacted the multicultural character of the empire within the capital. The temples themselves announced the pluralistic nature of the Qing dynasty, as well as its grandeur, through their public display of signs and stelae aimed at the multi-ethnic audiences of the empire.

Volume 8: Issue 1
Detail image of a painting of a fair-skinned man with a beard, wearing a hooded cloak, sitting in a lotus position levitating amongst clouds Essays In Search of Multiple Colors of Christ: Daniel J. Fleming and the American Protestant Encounter with Asian Christian Visual Arts, 1937-1940 Satoru Kimura

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ.

A statue of Mary, in chrome, in front of a white background. Constellations Like a Virgin? Breaking, (un)making, and replicating the Madonna across time, space, and toy stores Meg Bernstein and Meg Boulton

The authors set the nucleating body of the medieval Virgin in conversation with contemporary reimaginings of the Madonna to ask how hybridization, fracture, insertion, assemblage, color, multiplicity, and meaning around sacred and secular exchange can change the way we know and see in relation to these forms from the medieval to the postmodern.

Volume 7: Issue 1
Illustration of a Congolese army attacking a seated European monk in front of a steepled building and cross. Background is palm trees on sandy ground. Constellations Resoundings of Early Modern Afro-Catholic Festive Culture Miguel Valerio

This Constellation is intended to complement the author's book and give readers access to color versions of some of its illustrations, which could only be printed in black and white in the original publication. As in other parts of the Iberian world (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula and all the territories under Spanish and Portuguese control), these performances were usually staged by lay Catholic confraternities.

Shrine consisting children's toys and stuffed animals Constellations Petitionary Devotion: Folk Saints and Miraculous Images in Spanish America Frank Graziano

Votive practice in the Americas has Indigenous, Christian, and syncretic origins that contribute to the diversity of offerings, as do social class, gender, age, and region. Petitionary devotion is structured by an exchange that the votary proposes to a folk saint or miraculous image. The offerings that votaries promise are based on the presumption that folk saints and miraculous images, because they are like us, value what we value.

Volume 6: Issue 3 Characterizing Material Economies of Religion in the Americas

A special issue curated by Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides

Introductory Essay
Blue sky with a silver sculpture of connected letters Essays Characterizing Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: An Introduction Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides

Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to examining four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” The ambition of this issue is that the collective inquiries of its authors, which span various interpretive histories and genealogical fragments, can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.

Individual Contributions
Silver medal with a European soldier and an Indigenous man of Turtle Island shaking hands Essays Medals, Memory, and Findspots Pamela E. Klassen

For many Indigenous people of Turtle Island, also known as North America, treaty medals are material reminders of sacred promises made between their nations and the British Crown or the U.S. Government. Settlers and colonial officials, by contrast, have often treated these medals as mere trinkets.

Illustration of a woman with grey hair and dark skin, in a yellow and white dress and black hat, holds a baby in a yellow bonnet. Behind them are mountains and a sacred heart. Object Narratives Julia Greeley, Denver’s Angel of Charity Alexia Williams

More than a portrait of a holy person, an icon structures a present encounter with a saint and the community that the saint represents. What kind of encounter does Greeley’s icon conjure with race and Catholicism in the Old West?

An open journal with white lined pages. On the left page, there are a few lines of text and a few geometric sketches. The right page is filled with handwritten text. Object Narratives Hilma af Klint's Temple for the Paintings Paul C. Johnson

Through Af Klint’s journal entries and sketches, we can shift analyses of sacred space from the guise of transcendent force that simply “appears,” in the phenomenological nomenclature, and instead approach it as technique.

Front of a postcard featuring the cross view of a very large felled tree in front of a leafy green background. On the cross section of the tree, nine white text boxes label different rings on the tree with dates and events. Object Narratives Tree Rings and Blood Lines Sally Promey

These redwood rings are both family trees and family circles, literally naturalizing a canonical “American” familial heritage insistently recited and instantiated in many media and locations: artistic and built environments, judicial practice, legislation and policy, textbooks, land use, and national land theory. Heritage is a family business.

A figure with long, dark, curly hair is seated facing away from the viewer, draped in material covered in calligraphy. The same material covers the background of the image, and the figure's right hand is raised, holding a pen, writing on the material. Object Narratives Corporealizing Moroccan Place Ellen Amster

I wondered—how does a person become a place? A street, city quarter, mosque, or town could take the name of the wali interred there, like the cities of Sidi Slimane and Mawlay Idris. The sacred enters physical space through the body.

Dr. Levitt pictured, shoulders up, in a purple shirt and glasses, reading from Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts from her office. Object Narratives A Photograph in Words Laura Levitt

In her memoir, The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson writes about the over-thirty-year-old unsolved murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer, a case brought back to life in a Michigan court room. Who gets to tell this story? How should it be told?

A still from a YouTube video features a choir, symphony orchestra, and conductor on the Carnegie Hall stage Object Narratives Pausing on a Sunday: What Kind of Secular is the American Musical? Kathryn Lofton

The musical in which this song appears includes archetypal depictions of the modern artist and his attendant gendered capacities and failures. Sondheim would point out: its lyric is a single sentence; it is a description of a process; it includes a word, “forever,” that he observes makes him cry.

Two engraved whale teeth are photographed together vertically. The tooth on the left is engraved with a two-mast ship sailing in front of a landscape, with a border of palm fronds above the scene. The tooth on the right features a cloaked woman in profile Constellations Sperm Whale Teeth in Circulation: A Case Study in Material Economics Richard J. Callahan, Jr.

From Fijian ceremonial objects to nineteenth-century American whaling souvenirs, to airline membership cards, this constellation explores material economies through one raw material: sperm whale teeth.

Fourteen Magdalens--six kneeling in the front row, and eight standing behind--are photographed outside, in front of trees and brush, in black and white habits respective to their individual categorization. The photo is in mostly sepia tones. Object Narratives “Colored Magdalens,” House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, Baltimore, ca. 1930s Tracy Fessenden

Was [the Magdalens'] decision to own in perpetuity the status of penitent a judgment on waywardness, or a benediction? An internalization of white surveillance, or its repudiation?

An unlit candle in a glossy, rounded, yellow glass container sits unboxed beside a silver boxed candle, which most prominently says "Let it burn." and "SOUL" in black, white, and yellow text. Object Narratives Let. It. Burn. SoulCycle's Jonathan Adler Grapefruit Scented Candle Cody Musselman

While a stationary bike is the main conduit for the SoulCycle experience, perhaps no object plays a greater role in facilitating SoulCycle’s choreography of emotion than the brand’s signature grapefruit-scented candle.

Electronic screenshot of the Redeeming Home website homepage Object Narratives The Sticky Cookies of Biblical Womanhood Suzanne van Geuns

Biblical womanhood blogs often resemble the idealized Christian home they encourage women to build. Businesses have long recognized the potential for profit in networked domesticity, enticing bloggers to participate in commercial enterprise by promising percentages of purchase costs made through their sites.

Gold buddha standing Buddha statue photographed against a cardboard background Object Narratives eBay Buddha Alexandra Kaloyanides

This golden Buddha, which has a striking resemblance to a Burmese Buddha in the British Museum, came up for sale on eBay for the sum of $5,000.00. The material of teak, the economies of the British and Burmese empires, the religion then being named "Buddhism," now give us this American eBay Buddha.

Kim Kardashian sits on top of an enlarged heart shaped perfume bottle Object Narratives Wifey Dusty Gavin

The fragrance Wifey by KKW Fragrances was released in 2019. As wife to black artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), Kim KW claimed and sold the role of wifey. The “wifey” is not simply a wife. She is a model or caricature of a wife, a down-ass. The “wifey” signifies a new ideal in our contemporary popular culture.

Group Conversations
Stone path in an old cemetery, surrounded by dark trees, fog, and headstones and monuments of various sizes. Conversations Material Economies of Life-Time: Grief, Injury, Expiation, Desire Tracy Fessenden, Hillary Kaell, and Alexia Williams

Tracy Fessenden, Hillary Kaell, and Alexia Williams discuss three iterations of religious, material economies: bus stop clocks, cloistered Magdalens, and a Catholic prayer card from Denver.

Long brown hair fastened with bejeweled rose clip, photographed from the back with shoulders--in blue and pink floral top--in frame Conversations The Intimate Ironies of the Wifey: Material Religion and the Body Ellen Amster, Dusty Gavin, and Suzanne van Geuns

From the familiarity of scent to the spread of colonial/space time, and through Black vernacular culture and “linking” us to divine power through the digital, Ellen Amster, Dusty Gavin, and Suzanne van Geuns introduce us to the strange intimacies of the wifey.

Abstract painting with a circle at its centre divided up into segments of block colour Conversations Designing Risk, Accumulating Failure: Purgatory, the Planned, and Primitive Accumulation Kati Curts, Emily Floyd and Paul Johnson

In Fall 2020, Paul Johnson, Emily Floyd, and Kati Curts met on Zoom. In this edit of their extended conversation, the authors question “planned sacred space,” the role of design in creating religious experience, and the category of the “relic.”

Photo of a book against a dark background, opened to a full spread of a scientific illustration of a sperm whale Conversations The Old Gods: Whales, Oil, and Teak Judith Brunton, Richard Callahan and Alex Kaloyanides

Judith Ellen Brunton, Richard Callahan, and Alexandra Kaloyanides endeavor to find the resonances their images pose to characterizing material economies of religion in the Americas. In emails from the autumn of 2020, each offers moments of speculation on the contexts shaping their research objects, and the supernatural powers and economies they enchant.

Close detail image of a segment of a ring from a felled tree Conversations American Performances, Economies, and Genealogies of Constraint Laura Levitt, Sally Promey, and David Walker

In this collaboratively written exercise, the authors discuss the material significance of embodied sense perceptions and affects. Despite Protestant secularity’s claims to the contrary, sensation and affect are no more confined to interiorized subjective mental states than is religion merely belief.

Conversations The Currency of Religion in America in Three Acts: Market Logics, Emissaries of Kinship, and Technologies of Feeling Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Roxanne Korpan and Cody Musselman

Cody Musselman, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Roxanne Korpan each present an object for consideration. Together they think about what it means for each object to be involved in the material economy of religion. Their conversation traverses various geographies and traditions, and ponders how material objects can be carriers of religion.

Concluding Essay
View of bright, open building with white rafters pointed steeply at the roof. People, seen from a distance, walk through the space. Conversations A Closing Conversation Sarah Rivett and Lerone Martin

If the Marxian dialectic culminates with the mystification of the commodity, these essays seem to envision a sacralization and re-sacralization of the profane, such that matter is the accumulation of sacred value. Transcendence and enchantment in this account are very much “real” and just as ontologically entrenched as capitalism.