CONF: Home: new histories of living. London, 8-9 February 2018

Conference: Home: new histories of living. London, 8-9 February 2018

Registration is now open for the Institute of Historical Research’s 2018 Winter Conference, Home: new histories of living, on 8-9 February 2018.

The conference will bring together leading researchers to explore the ways that the home has been conceptualised, designed and lived in throughout history. These perspectives open the shutters on domesticity by showing how patterns of homemaking can reshape our conceptions of kinship, consumption and the everyday. The conference will take place over two days and is separated into four interrelated avenues of enquiry:

Reconstructions: imagining domestic experience, convened by Catherine Richardson (University of Kent)

Rooms: furnishing the idiosyncrasies of private life, convened by Sonia Solicari (The Geffrye Museum of the Home)

Home-work: reframing gendered spaces, convened by Lynne Walker (IHR)

Dream Homes: envisioning alternative futures for residential experience, convened by Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes University)

Eight plenary and panel sessions examine reconstructions, rooms, gender and home, and visions of idealised living. Special attention will be given to new methods for researching histories of ‘Home.’

Confirmed plenary speakers include:

  • Owen Hatherley (Architectural historian and journalist) on ‘A social democratic microcosm: St Mary’s Estate, Woolwich’
  • Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck, University of London) on ‘House and home in early modern London’
  • Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway, University of London) on ‘Finding Home in Institutions: Inside Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England’
  • Dan Cruickshank (Art historian and BBC presenter), presentation title TBC.

A preliminary programme and abstracts can be found on the conference website.

Registration (and information about concessions) are available here.

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