Gender and Urban Experience. Rome in the Modern Era

16 November 2017. From 18:30 | Workshop | English | IEMed, Barcelona

Cities are defined first and foremost by their materiality – walls, streets and squares, religious and secular buildings, public and private . The lives of individuals, men and women are also largely determined by the material environment in which they live, and relationships with others are continually regulated through the use of material objects. In all this, gender plays a major role. The aim of this conference, then, is to start from the specific case of Rome to investigate:

• The relationship between space (whether theoretically accessible or concretely proven) and the daily lives of men and women;

• The materiality of the houses, and the similarities and differences between the houses where they live mainly men or mainly women or both genders.

• The role of material objects – household furniture, clothing, ornaments – in determining the identity of men and women.

• Affective investments in material objects and ways of using things to create self-memory.

• The ways in which status, class, wealth and citizenship interact with gender and condition their ability to act.

The conference is delivered by Renata Ago, Professor of Modern History, La Sapienza University of Rome, where she has been President of the degree in Medieval, Modern and Contemporary History (2008), and Deputy Director of the Department of History, Anthropology and Religion (2011 ), others. Her line of research focuses on the social history of early modern times. She has also worked in the field of family and gender history and relationship between social exchanges, economic practices and institutions. She is currently researching topics related to consumerism and material culture, on which she has published the book “Il gusto delle cose. A history of objects in seventeenth-century Rome ”(Rome, Donzelli, 2006).