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From Space to Place: The Spatial Dimension in the History of Western Europe
16 and 17 April 2010 at the German Historical Institute, London
A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference, organised by the Centre for Research in History and Theory, Roehampton University
This conference will explore the so-called ‘spatial turn in history’ discussed among historians for the last decade or so and inspired by earlier anthropological ideas and the interdisciplinary approach by sociologists, especially geographers. It challenges the idea of place or space in history as an unreflected essentialist category linked to tradition and immutability. Instead, space as place is shown to be socially and culturally constructed, mediated and contested.
Organised into three separate but interlinking topics (social space, workplace and intimate space) papers will investigate how specific spaces in the past not only evoked but conveyed political, social, cultural and symbolic meaning and conversely how particular spaces/places influenced this meaning.
The conference is interdisciplinary; historians and geographers with an interest in politics, society, culture and gender as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, and literary scholars will explore the meaning of space in the past by situating it in its precise historical context. There will be broader reflections on historiography and theory as well as case studies from a wide chronological span (from the medieval, early modern to the modern period) but geographically restricted to Western Europe.
Downloads (Adobe PDF format)
Friday programme
- 10.00
- Registration
- 10.30
- Welcome by Andreas Gestrich, Director, German Historical Institute, and Cornelie Usborne, Roehampton University
- 10.45
-
General reflections
Beat Kümin (History, Warwick) 'The "spatial turn" from a historical perspective'
Linda McDowell (Human Geography, St John's College, Oxford) 'Space and place in geographical theory: from spatial differentiation to social relations'
Eliza Darling, (Anthropology, Goldsmith College, London) 'The spatial turn that wasn't: class, anthropology, and the triumph of place over space'
- 13.00
- Lunch at the German Historical Institute
- 14.00
-
Social Space
Matthew Johnson (Archaeology, Southampton) 'Late Medieval Spaces, Early Modern Practices'
Gerd Schwerhoff (History, Technical University Dresden) 'Public places in early modern towns'
- 15.00
- Tea break
- 15.30
-
Leif Jerram (Urban History, Manchester) 'Space: A Useless Category of Historical Analysis?' (with case studies from turn of the 20th-century Munich)
- 17.00
- Conference dinner
Saturday programme
- 10.00
- Coffee
- 10.30
-
Workplace
Jeremy Goldberg (History, York) '"I have mor to doo then I doo may": Problematising Labour, Space and Gender in later medieval England'
Amanda Flather (History, Essex) 'Space, place and gender: the sexual and spatial division of labour in the early modern household'
Steven King (History, Oxford Brookes) 'Work places and places of work: Labour market architecture and issues of space in Europe 1750-1870'
- 12.45
- Lunch at the German Historical Institute
- 13.45
-
Intimate Places
Felicity Riddy (English, York) 'Space, intimacy and values in the late medieval English "bourgeois" home'
Sandra Cavallo (History, Royal Holloway) 'Spaces for body-care and body services in the early modern Italian home'
Willem de Blėcourt (Historical Anthropology, Huizinga Institute, Amsterdam) 'Over the Threshold: liminality, proximity and intimacy in twentieth-century witchcraft discourse'
- 16.00
- Tea break
- 16.30
- Roundtable
- 17.30
- Close
Organising committee: Professor Cornelie Usborne, Professor John Tosh, Dr Charlotte Behr, Dr Sara Pennell, Dr John Seed, Dr Sabine Wieber, Professor Trevor Dean.
