'Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers' Available

24 July 2024

The collection of essays resulting from the online conference organised by Naomi Segal at the Institute in December 2021 is now available. 

The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces. Essays on Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. The volume contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces and, taken as a whole, it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.

Dwelling. Cultural Representations of Inhabited Places, published this spring, 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.

The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces. Essays on Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers, edited by James Brown, Anna Jamieson and Naomi Segal, is published by Brill.

Dwelling. Cultural Representations of Inhabited Places, edited by Orsolya Katalin Petőcz and Naomi Segal, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.