The Mind is a Collection is a born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models. Each object in this museum was used, at one time or another, to make sense of a mental process. Think of this as an exhibit of eighteenth-century mental life as seen from a material point of view. You are entering a museum of episodes in material thought. READ MORE...

RECENT NEWS: The catalogue for The Mind Is a Collection has been awarded this year's Kenshur Prize for "an outstanding monograph of interest to eighteenth-century scholars." It had previously been shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science 2015 Book Prize.

EXHIBITS at the MIND is a COLLECTION:

WHAT'S ON:

Featured

I: Metaphor

Explore a number of the most important metaphors of mind, with exhibits including John Locke's library, John Milton's bed, and Mark Akenside's museum.

II: Design

Delve into some of the period's mental spaces, sites of work and models of mind... including the next best thing to Being Alexander Pope.

III: Digression

How is the genre of the digression linked to politeness, gardening, and the history of microscopy? Why are digressions both tedious and delightful, both disreputable and crucial to learning?

IV: Interiority

We think of interiority as something we are born with, but these exhibits suggest that it was the achievement of an age.

V: Conception

How are new ideas born?

VI: Dispossession

In which the case is made that property (even intellectual property) is based on dispossession.

Read Christina Lupton's review in the Los Angeles Review of Books: "The Searcher of Patterns and the Keeper of Things" (6 March, 2016), and Jess Keiser's review in Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.4 (2016). Amy Haslanger reviews the museum for BSECS. Here's Paddy Bullard's insightful review for RES, Judith Pascoe's for The Journal of British Studies, Alexander Dick's for Modern Language Review, and another by Thomas Manganaro for Configurations. Here is Katy Barrett's review for West 86th, Marcus Tomalin's review for ECF, Melina Moe's for Restoration, Karin Kukkonen's for The Scriblerian, and Collin Jennings's dual review for ECF. MIAC features in Jenny Davidson's 2016 review of C18 scholarship for SEL, and again in the 2017 review by George Haggerty. Among the generous responses at the Kenshur Prize symposium on MIAC were Jason Baird Jackson's "Reflections."