While the importance of collections has been evident in the sciences and humanities for several centuries, the social and cultural significance of collecting practices is now receiving serious attention as well. As reflected in programs like Antiques Roadshow and American Pickers, and websites such as eBay, collecting has had a consistent and growing presence in popular culture. In tandem with popular collecting, institutions are responding to changes in the collecting environment, as library catalogs go online and museums use new technologies to help generate attendance for their exhibits. In Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things, Kevin M. Moist and David Banash have assembled several essays that examine collecting practices on both a personal and professional level. These essays situate collectors and collections in a contemporary context and also show how our changing world finds new meaning in the legacy of older collections. Arranged by such themes as "Collecting in a Virtual World," "Changing Relationships with Things," "Collecting and Identity-Personal and Political," and "Collecting Practices and Cultural Hierarchies," these essays help illuminate the role of objects in our lives. Covering a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives and subjects-from PEZ candy dispensers and trading cards to sports memorabilia and music-Contemporary Collecting will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, popular culture studies, sociology, art history, and more.

Steve Tomasula's work exists both at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literarytechniques. As such, it demands the work of critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts within which his work must be read if it is to be understood. This book, the first of its kind, provides these critical contexts, bringing readers into the rich worlds Tomasula constructs and showing them just why these worlds matter so much.Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities.