Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Places

Dwelling is both an action and a location; it combines the spatial idea of habitation (dwelling in) with the temporal idea of lingering (dwelling on). We live not only in bricks and mortar, a tent, a hut or a spaceship, but also in that most changeful of forms, our body, or in a remembered or virtual home. Especially since COVID-19 we have seen changes in the topography of everyday life. In this multi-disciplinary collection, a complex of meanings is approached from a variety of specific, often personal angles.
Framed by two longer essays which theorise how the psychology of home may change under sudden pressure and how social relations are embodied in windows, doors, walls and stairs, the book includes 18 further essays. Part I, ’Informal settlements’, shows how a slum, urban development or nomadic life may create a self-sustaining identity; in Part II, ’Huts and bridges’, impermanence shapes the state of dwelling, while Part III, ’Liminal bodies’, presents bodies suspended at thresholds of change. Movement in time and space characterises the last three sections: Part IV, ’Moving home’, depicts transitions and arrivals, Part V, ’Dwelling in Memory’, focuses on recollections of past places and Part VI, ’Are we there yet?’, points the way to a future in which the consulting-room changes to 2D, a family is exiled onto the small screen or we imagine breaking away altogether into outer space.

Orsolya Katalin Petőcz is a PhD student in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She explores queer testimonies across literature and the visual arts, with a focus on the accounts of survivors of World War II. Her work centres on sexuality, the Holocaust and migration. Her research articles have been published in Italian Studies, French Cultural Studies and Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies. Her co-authored piece ’(Un)Desired Others’ (2023) is related to her new project, the study of the stigma of promiscuity in the testimonies of Eastern European Holocaust survivors.
Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, an honorary fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge, a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques and a member of the Academia Europaea. She founded the IGRS in 2004 and represented the UK in the European Science Foundation 2005-2011. She researches in comparative cultural studies and is the author of 19 books, including monographs Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (2009), André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (1998), The Adulteress’s Child (1992) and Narcissus and Echo (1988). She is currently completing a monograph on replacement.