SAH Historic Interiors Affiliate Group (HIG) Emerging Scholars Symposium.
No Fixed Abode: Histories of the Mobile and Itinerant Interior.

Time: 10.30 am – 2 pm EDT [UTC-4h] / 4.30 – 8 pm CET [UTC+2h]

The Society of Architectural Historians Historic Interiors Group (HIG) invites you to the 6th Annual Emerging Scholars Symposium, No Fixed Abode: Histories of the Mobile and Itinerant Interior. As the symposium’s title suggests, the interior has long been equated with fixity — the bounded, sheltered space that offers a retreat, comfort and safety. Yet a significant and underexplored category of interiors has always been designed precisely to move, carrying its occupants across distances and borders, providing comfort, shelter, and sociability associated with settled life. This symposium brings together a group of emerging scholars that analyse mobile and itinerant interiors as objects of historical inquiry in their own right, from luxury custom-made interiors to ad-hoc shelters. As these spaces are defined by their functions and usages rather than by any fixed location and, as such, resist the methods and archives on which interior history has conventionally relied, they also address the methodological challenges of mobile interiors through their case-studies.

Graduate students, postdocs, and recent graduates from diverse disciplinary fields will present their papers across two sessions. The first, Ideal(ised) Interiors: Identity and the Mobile Politics of Display, considers how mobile and translocated interiors stage identity and power, while the second, Making Do, Moving On: Adaptable, Portable and Itinerant Conditions of the Interior, turns to interiors designed or improvised to be used under constraint or by displaced communities. Together, the six presentations trace the interior from the ceremonial to the precarious, testing how spaces designed to move reshape long-held accounts of comfort, hierarchy, and home.

Schedule
Session 1: Ideal(ised) Interiors: Identity and the Mobile Politics of Display

Adorning Mobility: Gender, Jewelry, and Temporary Courtly Interiors in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs – Isabel Escalera Fernandez

Minimal clutter, maximum flexibility, and easy mobility”: Italian Interiors in the Context of the Colonial Project, 1936–1940 – Dorotea Petrucci

Behind Drawn Curtains: Surveillance and Scandal in the Translocated Interiors of the Open-Air Museum – Radu Remus Macovei
Q&A

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Session 2: Making Do, Moving On: Adaptable, Portable and Itinerant Conditions of the Interior

Humanitarian Interiors: AERMO’s Emergency Furnishing Package – Maria Kouvari

The Mobile Interior as Sacred Device: Franco Raggi’s Tents and Roulottes – Bianca Felicori

When Home Moves: Domestic Space, Gendered Remaking, and the Ethnography of Absence in Displaced Sudanese Household – Gadsiah Ibrahim
Q&A

The virtual symposium is open to all, but registration in advance is required. The registration form, speaker bios, and abstracts are available on the Historic Interiors Group website: https://sahhistoricinteriorsaffiliategroup.sah.hcommons.org/2026/08/07/sah-historic-interiors-affiliate-group-hig-emerging-scholars-symposium-2026/

Register in advance for this online symposium: https://sah1365.zoom.us/meeting/register/uV1pZRmXRve4e32yuJGbXw