In the Space Between Society scholars studying literature, media, art, society, and culture between 1914 and 1945 exchange ideas about their approaches and their objects of study. This year’s conference addresses the varied material cultures that shape the world within which people live, work, and make art. We invite researchers to ask: • Which material practices shape this period and our knowledge about it?
• What methods and assumptions must we bring to bear on the objects of our study?
• What are the challenges of working on material culture and bringing such work into conversation with scholars in a range of fields?

Possible presentation or panel topics include:

• Print culture
• Museums and Exhibitions
• Fashion
• Architecture and the built environment
• The city
• Interior design
• The archive
• The material culture of war
• Memory practices
• Archaeology
• Anthropology and ethnography
• Theorizing objects, things, and stuff
• Theatre, performance, and embodiment
• Media and the materialization of culture
• The temporalities of material culture
Keynote Speaker, Elaine Freedgood will address the intersections between nineteenth and twentieth century understandings of materiality. She is the author of Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge 2000) and The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago 2006) and the editor of Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford 2003). Her interests include Victorian literature and culture, critical theory, novel theory and pedagogy. Her new book is about fictionality, reference and metalepsis in nineteenth-century fiction.