Conferences
Frith Lea Hurst, home of Florence Nightinale

The Home in
Modern History
and Culture

Workshop

 

Date

Monday 27 January 2020

Time

9.30am-5pm

Venue

Council Room, Trent Building, University Park

Cost

Free

Register here

 
 

Is this for you?

The Home in Modern History and Culture will be the second in a series of three thematic workshops for our 'Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020' project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Following the first successful event on nineteenth-century healthcare, this second workshop seeks to examine, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the broad theme of 'Home' and its applicability as a prism through which to understand historical change.

'Home' is an elusive notion, lacking a permanent definition; it is a concept that is manifested through specific places and at specific times yet also transcends these. Edwin Heathcote, in The Meaning of Home (2012), wrote that homes are 'receptacles of both personal and collective memory, containers of meaning and symbol'.

The history of the home unavoidably overlaps with histories of gender, work and architecture, geographies of mobility, and cultural and literary readings of concepts such as domesticity, the family, and privacy.

In recent decades, these concepts have become fundamental to readings of modern social history, not least in the 19th century. For example, scholars use domesticity as a prism through which to investigate the history of public buildings, institutions and public spaces, alongside the Foucauldian paradigm of power and control. 

The case of Florence Nightingale demonstrates the richness and elasticity of the term ‘home’. Home for Nightingale meant variously a childhood sanctuary, a prison constraining women's energy, the object of sanitary reform, a communal place for nurses to live and study, a spiritual refuge, and the place one went to after death. These ideas will be explored in the forthcoming book Florence Nightingale At Home, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

While the team's focus is on 19th-century Britain, the workshop welcomes contributions from a range of periods and locations. Papers are invited from specialists in history, literature, geography, architecture, material culture, or other scholars with new/distinctive perspectives on the history and culture of the home.

The conference will address the following themes:

  • What has been the historical relationship between (ideas of) home and the built environment? How do changing uses of space, furniture and decoration reflect ideological/cultural/
    historical patterns?
  • What tensions can be observed between ideologies of domesticity on the one hand, and life in non-family based institutions on the other?
  • What has 'home' meant in such institutions as: hospitals, convents, boarding schools, asylums, military barracks, prisons, factories?
  • How have ideas of 'homeliness' been challenged/modified/subverted at different times?
  • How far is 'home' a useful concept for understanding national, cultural, or ideological histories?
  • How has home been represented and contested in literature and popular culture? To what extent have these depictions of home influenced other forms of discourse, for example, health discourse?

Cost

There is no charge for attendance.

A limited number of travel bursaries are available for travel within the UK. To apply, email richard.bates1@nottingham.ac.uk and include an estimate of your travel costs.

Conference essentials

Download programme here

Location map (pdf)

Contact the organiser

Richard Bates

Keynote speaker

Professor Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway)

Funding

Arts and Humanites Research Council

The workshop is fully funded as part of the AHRC Research
Grant-funded project 'Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020: an historico-literary analysis of her family life', grant ref AH/R00014X/1

 

 

Conferences

The University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham
NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5151