At the moment I am heavily involved, along with my colleagues Emmett O'Keeffe and Terry O'Hagan in the organisation of TAT 2009. TAT, or to give it its full title Thinking About Things: Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture, was a response by the three of us to a call for proposals for conference funding from the UCD Graduate School of Arts and Celtic Studies. All three of us being perennial volunteers and always looking for something to distract attention from actual PhD work, we were immediately on the look out for some ideas.

With a little help along the way from Dr. Graeme Warren and Dr. Jo Bruck we realised there was an existing college research strand on material culture. A subject central to archaeology but also lots of other disciplines. We decided to go with it, making it a truly inter-disciplinary effort (I don't think the website even mentions archaeology).

Preparations are well under way and in fact we are meeting to go through the submitted abstracts tomorrow. Its a big job because we have received about double the number we expected, from all across Europe and America. Hopefully the programme will be up soon. In the meantime make sure you register and come to Dublin from the 5th to the 7th May 2009!

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