Invitation to the book project and workshop Building Early Modern Privacy
In a present-day understanding, privacy is often limited to a private room in a home, preferably behind a closed door. In contrast, scholarship on the built environment of early modern society, as well as anthropological research on non-western cultures, has shown that privacy could be provided much more flexibly by various spaces—indoors as well as outdoors. We will examine the building elements, thresholds, zones, rooms, buildings and (urban) outdoor spaces which could be claimed or adapted to experience privacy.
This book will be the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary investigation of the spaces of privacy in early modern history, with a view to today’s privacy concerns. We will examine privacy at different scales of the built world—ranging from building elements to entire buildings to cityscapes. These architectural scales can be linked to the heuristic zones developed by Mette Birkedal Bruun as a tool to analyse privacy: https://teol.ku.dk/privacy/research/work-method/.
The book will discuss both opportunities and delimitations for privacy by considering a range of perspectives: how privacy was enabled or constrained by construction and design (architecture and archaeology), legal regulation, and social behaviour in response to these material and legal frameworks (social history and historical anthropology). It will thereby include a span from intended use to routinized practices of privacy. We will explore how the built world contributed to the construction of the concept and the experience of privacy.
The point of departure is European cities, their colonial counterparts and encounters. In addition to the analysis of spaces of privacy of the early modern period, each chapter will offer reflections on the present-day. We envision a peer-reviewed, richly illustrated book to gather an unprecedented account and visualization of the spaces of privacy of the early modern period, as well as a meaningful reflection on what spaces of privacy constitute today.
We hereby invite you to contribute with a chapter to this book. Each chapter should focus on a specific spatial unit:
a) a building element (e.g. screens, balustrades, windows, niches, etc, and their relation to the experience of privacy)
b) a room (which could vary drastically in its provision of privacy depending on time of day, season, use, etc)
c) a small building (e.g. pavilion, tea house, hermitage, post office, bath house, chapel)
d) a large building (e.g. palace, court house, city hall, workplaces)
e) an outdoor space (e.g. streetscape, landscape, park, garden, infrastructural space, exploring privacy as a phenomenon also experienced outdoors)
Examples of individual buildings, rooms, and spaces are welcome and should be treated as emblematic of broader spatial and privacy developments of the time.
Time plan
To register your contribution, please submit an abstract (max 300 words) to npk@teol.ku.dk and jbl@teol.ku.dk at latest 2 May 2024. The headline should include the suggested building type and the text should address how privacy can be studied in this building type as well as examples of what sources or examples you aim to use.
Please also indicate if you are able to participate at the workshop 19–20 September 2024 in Copenhagen. We are applying for funds hoping to be able to cover accommodation and travel expenses for those participants that do not get it covered from their workplace.
The workshop builds on peer-feedback on pre-circulated drafts of the chapters. Our aim is that the workshop will offer each text valuable input from experts in architectural construction and design, legal frameworks, social practices, etc.
Time plan
Deadline for abstract: 2 May 2024.
The deadline for full texts is 20 January 2025. After a short round of comments from the editors, the entire manuscript will be sent to peer-review at latest 28 February 2025.
We aim to have the publication out in 2026, with a university press.
Best regards,
the editors of the book and arrangers of the workshop:
Mette Birkedal Bruun, Professor, Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138)
Peter Thule Kristensen, Professor, The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation & Core scholar at the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138)
Johannes Ljungberg, Assistant Professor, Centre for Privacy Studies
Natalie P. Körner, Assistant Professor, The Royal Danish Academy & Centre for Privacy Studies
