Reframing Home, Race, Art and Empire: A Symposium

10am - 10.15am  Registration 

10.15am - 10.30am  Welcome 

10.30am - 11.30am  Tour and talks from Museum of the Home and Tate Britain 

11.30am - 11.50am  Layers of Difference: Exploring the Nuances of ‘Othered’ Identities in the Context of Colonial Britain with Elizabeth Egan 

This talk will consider Rebecca Solomon’s Jewish background, economic position and family relationships, as well as Fanny Eaton and her connection to the Solomons and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The relationship between Rebecca and Fanny will act as a starting point for wider discussion of the differences and convergences of the experiences of othered minorities in the context of colonial Victorian Britian. A visual analysis of Rebecca Solomon’s A Young Teacher (1861) will explore research on how the similarities and divergences of Rebecca and Fanny’s ‘otherness’ manifests in the artwork. 

11.50am - 12.10pm  A Home from Home: Pioneering Ayahs and Amahs in Hackney with Niti Acharya 

Local history is a powerful way to reframe histories of empire and turn global subjects into stories that resonate or connect with familiar places around us. This talk will attempt to show how travelling ayahs and amahs were a foundation stone for colonial families arriving in the UK. Their concentration in numbers at the Ayahs’ Home in Hackney was only one aspect of their nationwide presence, which is often difficult to uncover because of the limited archival and material record left by, or about, working-class Asian women in the UK. 

12.10pm - 12.30pm  Q&A / discussion  

12.30pm - 1.30pm  Lunch  

1.30pm - 1.50pm  Talking Paintings: Portraits in the Long Eighteenth-Century and the Power of Stories with Karen Lipsedge 

Portraits of women of colour in historical art enable us to harness the power of stories and engage diverse audiences with not only art history, but also the nuanced and complex histories of peoples often overlooked. This talk will focus on one double portrait; David Martin’s 'Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Belle' (1779) and considers what the painting reveals about conceptions of race, gender, social class, space and time, as well as the relationship between viewer and patron, sitters and artist. It asks wider questions about the value of exploring those stories of peoples and objects that are often overlooked and left hiding in plain sight.  

1.50pm - 2.10pm  Sinews: A list with Amy Peace Buzzard 

Sinews: A List is a poetic text and artworks series expanding domestic consumption as an extension of British imperial structures. Positioning domestic habits as a mode that inserts the self within a cultural narrative, this text centres around list writing, highlighting this repeated involvement as forming an extension of the body into a socio-political sphere. The artist explores habituated whiteness, developing new modes of understanding the vitality of a home as a location through which colonial narratives should be confronted. 

2.10pm - 2.30pm  ‘Kingdoms of Babes’: Home Nurseries as Medico-Moral Domains of Infants in late 19th- and early 20th-century America with Elisabeth Yang 

For the medical community and growing readership of white, middle-class mothers and mothers-to-be in late 19th and early 20th-century America, domestic architecture had a prescriptive power; the configurations of the home nursery would lead to the configurations of the infant, and in turn, the ‘civilised’ race, and nation. This talk will explore the home nursery as a sanctified space of science, technology, religion, and politics, a dynamic site where various babyhoods existed—mechanistic, plant-like, savage, tyrannical, innocent, and patriotic. 

2.30pm - 2.50pm  Screening: A (Maid's) Room of One's Own (Myriam Dao, 8’45’’, 2021) with a commentary with Barbara Bessac 

Virginia Woolf once asked what space women writers could occupy in literature; Myriam Dao extends this inquiry to women who had even less voice—maids in 1950s Paris through her film A (Maid’s) Room of One’s Own. The film reimagines a fictional domestic interior, creating a temporary period room that materializes the identity of maids, where the unseen becomes tangible through the objects, structures, and imagined voices of those long silenced. Through this lens, we examine how their bodies and identities were shaped, confined, and defined by the spaces of their rooms. 

2.50pm - 3.10pm Q&A / discussion  

3.10pm - 3.30pm  Break  

3.30pm - 4.30pm  Waiting and Caring for the empire: Travelling Ayahs in Britain with Arunima Datta 

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. This talk will focus on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia. Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, the talk illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.

4.30pm - 4.35pm  Closing remarks  

4.35pm - 5.30pm  Drinks reception 

Elizabeth Egan’s background is in (Modern) History having studied at Queen Mary’s University and focusing on the impact of colonialism in film. Their previous roles at Tate Modern include working on the Uniqlo Tate play programme, delivering art talks on the works of Ana Mendieta, Agnes Martin and Anu Poder. Since early 2024, they have been delivering the Learning and Engagement programme at Jewish Museum London. Alongside delivering school sessions centred on British Jewish history, Egan leads on the family programme, where they incorporate the Museum’s collection into events and activities. 

Niti Acharya is the Manager of Hackney Museum and researches the presence of ayahs in the UK. She founded the Ayahs and Amahs Research Network, an international multidisciplinary collaboration amongst those researching this subject. 

Karen Lipsedge is Associate Professor in English Literature, and a Senior Teaching and Learning Adviser at Kingston University, England. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century domestic space, interiors, the relationship between objects and people, and its representation in British eighteenth-century literature and art. She has published widely in the area, including her monograph, Domestic Space in the Eighteenth-Century British Novels (2012). She has also co-edited several recent publications, including, At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space (2021), co-edited with Stephen Hague and ‘Feminisms: Intersectionality in Domestic Fiction’. Karen is also working on a new project: ‘Speaking Texts: Uncovering Hidden Voices', which takes interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to literary and visual material to uncover often overlooked and ignored stories and their authors and provide an inclusive platform for them to be heard. 

Amy Peace Buzzard is a multidisciplinary maker working in London. Her practice centres around the domestic scene, the objects in our lives that shape who we are. Installation acts a key method within her work, bringing together layers of narrative, poetics and crafted objects, forming comments on the social. Amy is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London, and has recently taken on a role as a Community Author at the Museum of Home, London. 

Elisabeth M. Yang is a senior postdoctoral researcher and Wellcome Early Career Award recipient in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. Prior to her role at Leeds, Dr. Yang taught at the Kilachand Honors College of Boston University and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Health Humanities of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she draws from the history and philosophy of science and medicine, medical humanities, sociology, theology, childhood studies, and material culture. She is the co-editor of the special issue of Osiris on the theme of histories of science and histories of childhoods. Dr. Yang is working on her first book, Constructing Moral Babies, concerning the historical and philosophical constructions of 'moral' babies in American medical and pedagogical discourses during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the University of Leeds, her Wellcome Project concerns a history and philosophy of infants, infancy, and infant care and education as conceptualised in Britain and America during the long nineteenth century.

Barbara Bessac is a researcher, lecturer, curator, and artist based in London. She teaches contemporary art history and visual theory at NYU London and history of design and decorative arts at the University of the Arts London. Her research focuses on the history of material culture in relation to the performing arts, cinema and entertainment. She earned her PhD both in History of Art from Université Paris Nanterre and in Theatre Studies from the University of Warwick in 2022, with a thesis titled “Living décor. Performance and decorative arts, from theatrical stages to domestic interiors, Paris and London 1851-1908”. She now writes on the history of fictional interiors. 

Myriam Dao is an artist and independent scholar whose work bridges her background in architecture and geography. Her research and practice focus on popular and vernacular cultures, with a particular emphasis on vernacular architecture. At the heart of her work is an exploration of the body—its social, memorial, and physical dimensions. Using minimalist methods, she creates texts, photographs, videos, and objects. She has taught web design at Sciences Po and art practice in public schools, and her writings have appeared in various collective publications. In 2023, she released her debut novel.

Arunima Datta is a historian of British Empire and Asian (South and Southeast Asian) history and an assistant professor at Department of History, University of North Texas. Her research and teaching explore the everyday experiences of labor migrants within the context of the British Empire. Her book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2021), disrupts the male- dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labor migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants, with colonial laws and negotiated world wars. She also serves as an Associate Editor for the journals Gender & History and Britain and the World, and as an Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review.