Call for papers: CSH conference: Teaching and Learning about home and domestic life

Thursday 27 June 2013, The Geffrye Museum of the Home

The home and domestic life are rich subjects for life-long learning. Home is part of the history curriculum in schools and has become the focus for a growing range of undergraduate courses in subjects such as anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history and literary studies. The home and domestic life are centrally important in the learning and engagement programmes of a wide range of museums, including those specialising in the domestic interior, historic house museums, living history museums and houses associated with notable individuals.

The conference, to be held at the Geffrye Museum of the Home, brings together educators working on home and domestic life in schools, universities and the museum and heritage sectors. Papers are invited that address the opportunities and challenges of teaching and learning about home to different age groups and diverse communities. By bringing together educators from a wide range of contexts and places, the conference aims to address the distinctive issues involved in teaching and learning about home and domestic life in the past and present.

For more information please see the call for papers.

Please submit a 200 word abstract to Jacqueline Winston-Silkby Monday 22 April.

Histories of Home SSN Fifth Annual Conference: Home Intimacies

Bookings are now open for the Histories of Home SSN fifth annual conference, Home Intimacies, to be held on Friday 22 March 2013 at the Geffrye Museum of the Home.

This conference seeks to examine the many intimacies of home – familial, social, sexual – and the role of emotions, material objects, home spaces and household structures in fostering, limiting and mediating intimacy. Papers will explore intimacy in both the past and present, across a range of places and from a range of disciplines. Themes will include notions of privacy for people living in institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, issues relating to intimacy in lesbian, gay and bisexual homes and changing attitudes to the privacy of beds. Some papers will examine how intimacy is presented in historic house museum settings.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway, University of London “Public, Private or Intimate? Rethinking the Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class Home

A full programme can be found here: Home Intimacies Programme

Tickets for the conference are £40 (£25 for students).

To reserve a place please download the booking form and return it to Hannah Brown.

Call for Papers: Home time: temporalities of domestic life

Conference session at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, Annual conference, London, 28-30 August 2013

Domestic life contains within it traces of past homes and prospects of future homes. It is lived with senses of continuity and change between different times and spaces of home. This session brings together research exploring domestic life with a special attentiveness to temporality in the meaning and experience of home. This includes the home’s own lived, material and imagined past, present and possible future; the nature and experience of home over the life course; the home as a site of looking back and looking ahead; and the ways in which both past and future homes shape ongoing relationships with domestic space and practices of home-making. The session explores how themes of continuity, change, loss, nostalgia, memory and plans, prospects and expectations of the future cross cut the lived, material and emotional geographies of home.

Convenors: Prof. Alison Blunt, Dr Caron Lipman, Prof. Catherine Nash, Dr Alastair Owens, School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London

Please send 200 word abstracts to Catherine Nash, School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, c.nash@qmul.ac.uk by 1 February 2013.

Please note: the session is subject to being accepted by the RGS-IBG conference organisers. We will be able to confirm this by late February.

Call for Papers: Home Intimacies: Histories of Home SSN fifth annual conference

The Histories of Home Subject Specialist Network (SSN) is inviting papers for the fifth annual conference, to be held at the Geffrye Museum in London on Friday 22 March 2013.  Home Intimacies call for papers.

Keynote speaker: Dr Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway, University of London
“Public, Private or Intimate? Rethinking the Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class Home”

This conference seeks to examine the many intimacies of home – familial, social, sexual – and the role of emotions, material objects, home spaces and household structures in fostering, limiting and mediating intimacy. We aim to bring together papers exploring intimacy in both the past and present, across a range of places and from a range of disciplines.

Papers might include, but are not limited to:

• (changing) notions of intimacy over time and space
• the (changing) role of domestic spaces, practices and material objects in mediating intimacy
• intimacy and emotions in the home
• intimacy across a range of household relationships – parent/child; master-mistress/domestic servants; siblings; couples and polyamorous relationships; friendship and companionship; human/pet
• intimacy over the life-cycle
• home and intimacy beyond the household (eg. over diaspora)
• contested intimacies at home
• representations of intimacy at home in text and image (including domestic/family photography and film)

Please submit proposals, including title, abstract (200-300 words) and a brief biographical statement (100 words) by 10 January 2013 to:

 Alexandra Goddard, Assistant Keeper – Interpretation and Exhibitions

Participants will be notified of acceptance by 31 January 2013.

Seminar: Domestic Advice Literature and Histories of Home

The Histories of Home Specialist Subject Network and the Modern Interiors Research Centre (Kingston University) are pleased to announce a one-day seminar on ‘Domestic Advice Literature and Histories of Home’.

The seminar will take place on Thursday 31 January 2013 at the Geffrye, Museum of the Home, London.

The event will bring together scholars from different disciplines to consider the role of advice literature in the study of the home, its design and interiors, recognising the significance of the source in shaping our perceptions and representations of the domestic sphere. Examples of home decoration and household management advice published from the second of half of the 19^th century onwards will be discussed. Themes will include the problematic nature of the relationship between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ interiors and the multiple agendas and influences which can inform the production of different types of domestic advice.

Speakers will include Professor Penny Sparke (Kingston University), Dr Grace Lees-Maffei (University of Hertfordshire), Dr Lesley Hoskins, Dr Rachel Ritchie (Brunel University), Dr Emma Ferry (Nottingham Trent University), Dr Nicholas Tromans (Kingston University) and Dr Patricia Lara-Betancourt (Kingston University).

The full programme for the day can be found here: Domestic Advice Literature Programme

Tickets for the seminar will be priced at £20 (£10 for students).

To reserve a place, please download the seminar booking form and email it to Hannah Brown.

DHS Student Travel Award

The Student Travel Award is awarded by the Design History Society biannually to encourage and support research activity amongst students in the field of design history. The grant is open to all undergraduates and postgraduate scholars in the field of design history in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

The next Student Travel Award application deadline is January 15^th 2013.

This award of up to £500 can help with the cost of research trips, including travel and expenses.

Please see the website for more details.

The Domestic Space Reader

The Domestic Space Reader, edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, has just been published by the University of Toronto Press!

This pioneering anthology, which is ideal for students and general readers, features writing by key scholars, thinkers, and writers including Gaston Bachelard, Mary Douglas, Le Corbusier, Homi Bhabha, Henri Lefebvre, Mrs. Beeton, Ma Thanegi, Diana Fuss, Beatriz Colomina, and Edith Wharton. Among the many engaging topics explored are: the impact of domestic technologies on family life; the relationship between religion and the home; nomadic peoples and housing; domestic spaces in art and literature, and the history of the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The Domestic Space Reader demonstrates how discussions of domestic spaces can help us better understand our inner lives and challenge our perceptions of life in particular times and places.

Chiara Briganti is the academic director for British Programmes of the College of Global Studies at Arcadia University and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London.

Kathy Mezei is a professor emeritus in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

Please find the order form and more information here: Briganti Domestic Space Reader