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Objects surround us in our everyday lives. We make them, we use them, we accumulate them, and sometimes we obsess over them. Yet, we often pay little attention to how they shape our interactions with the world. My research focuses on Surrealism and how objects are used, created and collected in this multifaceted avant-garde movement. André Breton, the famous surrealist poet and leader of Surrealism in France held a 15,000-piece private art collection in Paris. Over the course of his lifetime, Breton assembled a constellation of ethnographic, artistic and ephemeral objects, stones, minerals, and taxidermy in his studio-apartment in Paris. In my research, I have found that his collection was a crucial stimulus for his writing, and that his objects were vital agents in his creative work. Why did he collect objects, what role did they play in his surrealist art and writing, and how was this practice political? My interdisciplinary work takes up these questions in conversation with the current field of material studies that seeks to unravel the notion of an anthropocentric world by considering objects as agents. My most recent article, “Surrealist Objects” (in press at Cambridge University) contends that André Breton’s theorization of surrealist objects in the 1930s was heavily influenced by the poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, and his materialist conception of poetry from the late 19th century. I am also working on a book, Writing Surrealist Objects: Collecting the Inexplicable in André Breton’s Atelier, 1931-1966, in which I show how collecting was key to the development of a surrealist poetics which proposes a materialist-based engagement with the world.