In this lecture - organised as part of our LGBTQ History Month programming - Dr Freya Gowrley will ask how a microhistorical approach to the space of the eighteenth-century home might reveal overlooked narratives and lost histories uncovered when close attention is paid to places and objects.
This lecture explores how a ‘commitment to overcloseness’ engendered by a microhistorical approach creates a more encompassing history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space. It reveals the overlooked narratives and lost histories uncovered when attention is paid to places and objects that lie outside of traditional areas of historical enquiry. The paper focuses on homes that have previously been sidelined from canonical histories in favour of country estates and grand London town houses, or which have been treated as exceptional curiosities to be read against broader aesthetic trends, something that Matthew M. Reeve has called the ‘shared historical trajectory’ of sexuality and aesthetics. The lecture looks at these overlapping othernesses: whether gendered, sexual, canonical, or aesthetic; something that creates space for deep attention to objects, homes, and lives previously neglected. Exploring lost evidence, histories, spaces and objects, the lecture examines the potential ‘queernesses’ of the home at the turn of the 19th century. It explores several case studies including Strawberry Hill, Plas Newydd, and A la Ronde, whose relationship with loss allow for an unravelling of the queer domesticities of the eighteenth-century home
Dr Freya Gowrley is Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Derby. Previously, she was a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Postdoctoral Fellow, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Edinburgh’s History of Art department. Her monograph, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, and she has published articles in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, Journal 18, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction
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