new: extended deadline May 25th, 2019

Individual paper submissions for an open call panel
"The Home and The World: The Domestic Interior in South Asia and Beyond”
for the American Council of Southern Asian Art Symposium (ACSAA)

November 7-9, 2019, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Chair: Heeryoon Shin, Vanderbilt University (heeryoon.shinvanderbilt.edu)

Studies of South Asian architecture have largely centered on public buildings and spaces – temples, mosques, tombs, gardens, forts and palaces – and their exterior as sites of identity formation and cross-cultural negotiations. Instead, this panel shifts the focus to the home and its interior. Domestic spaces have been considered as private, affective, and feminine, separate from the public, official, and masculine realm. Recent scholarship in gender studies, however, has increasingly challenged these binary divisions and underscored the home as a deeply politicized space with its meanings extending beyond its physical boundaries. This panel explores the active role of domestic interiors and their contents in shaping and performing political, religious, and social identities, transforming taste and consumption, and facilitating cultural exchange and production at local, regional, and global levels.

We invite papers that complicate and expand assumptions about domestic interiors and the private/public across time periods as well as geographical regions – domestic interiors and their contents in South Asia and their circulation and recreation outside South Asia are both welcome. Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to spatial planning of the home and its experience, specific rooms in the home, relationships between interior and exterior spaces, reuse and conversion, the production and consumption of material objects and furnishings, collecting and domestic display, representations of real and imaginary interiors, interior design manuals and their circulation, and domestic interiors as museum displays (such as house museums and period rooms).

Please send your paper abstract and a short CV by May 24, 2019 to Heeryoon Shin (heeryoon.shinvanderbilt.edu).

Further information:
https://acsaa-symposium.eca.ed.ac.uk/