CSDI - The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London, brings together three institutions: the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London. Launched in September 2001, its goal is to develop new histories of the home, its contents, and its representation. It pursues research into the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of buildings, from tenements to palaces; the objects that furnished those rooms; the ways rooms and objects were depicted; the manner in which people used them; and how they thought about them.

The Domestic Interior: 1600 to 1940
Postgraduate Research Day

Friday, 22 November 2002
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Jean Muir Seminar Room

Programme

10.00–10.15 Registration and coffee

10.15–11.45 Panel 1 – From Production to Consumption

Emma Ferry (Kingston): ‘… information for the ignorant and aid for the advancing…’: Publishing the 'Art at Home' Series, 1876–1883

Elizabeth Kramer (Manchester): Passive Objects or Active Agents? Japanese Textiles and Women in the Victorian Home, 1870–1900

Amanda Girling-Budd (Royal College of Art): The Meaning of Taste

Sarah Cheang (Sussex): Modern Women and Chinese Drawing Rooms: Femininity, Soul and Chinese Things in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

11.45–12.15 Coffee

12.15–1.15 Problem Panel – Reading Rooms and Representations

Jo Taylor (University College, London): Limitations and Possibilities: Perceptions of the Domestic Interior in the Seventeenth Century

Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway, London): What Is the Use of the Photograph to the Study of the Domestic Interior?

John Hubbard (Southampton): Disclosing Intimacy: Approaching the Reading of Rooms as Personal Space

1.15–2.15 Lunch

2.15–3.30 Panel 2 – Imaginings and Experiences

Neil Armstrong (York): Christmas and the Domestic Interior in the Nineteenth Century

Sara Thornton: The Topography of Childhood: Epistemological Structures in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew

Fiona Hackney (Goldsmith’s, London): 'Show me her kitchen and I will tell you the manner of woman she is': Representations and Readings of Domesticity in British Mass Market Women’s Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

3.30–3.45 Coffee

3.45–5.15 Panel 3 – Dwellings and Inhabitants

Ruth Larsen (York): The Pleasures of the ‘homely ones’: Female Experiences of Domestic Life in the Eighteenth-Century Yorkshire Country House

Adrian Evans (Bristol): From Passive ‘Buildings’ to Active ‘Dwellings’: Domestic Spaces in Eighteenth-Century Suffolk and Bristol

Hannah Greig (Royal Holloway, London): Private Palaces and Public Lives: Fashionable Elite Interiors in Eighteenth-Century London

Julie Schlarman (Southampton): Spaces of Power: The Functioning of Interior Space as Political Performance in the Early Eighteenth-Century London Townhouse – Grosvenor Square 1720–1760

5.15–5.30 Closing discussion

Information

This event is organized by the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (Royal College of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Royal Holloway, University of London) and supported by the Design History Society and the Royal Historical Society. It is the first in a series of annual interdisciplinary events that bring together postgraduates working on the domestic interior to discuss their latest research.

The symposium will take place at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the Jean Muir Seminar Room, located at the top of the Lecture Theatre landing, which is off the Silver Galleries. Registration begins at 10.00 AM, when the Museum opens.

Registration
Fees: Full price - £15, DHS members - £11, Student price - £5. Fee includes sandwich lunch, morning coffee and afternoon tea.

Registration is done by prebooking. The deadline for registration is 13 November 2002. To register, complete the booking form and send along with a cheque made out to Royal College of Art to:

Ann Matchette (Research Coordinator)
AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, Royal College of Art Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
Tel: 020 7590 4183; email: ann.matchette@rca.ac.uk

Limited funds may be available to assist with student travel costs, available on a first-come first-serve basis. Please contact Ann Matchette for details.