PRIVACY SEMINAR: The Control of Space: Privacy, Gender, and Object in Early Modern England
With Dr. Audrey Thorstad, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Bangor University.
Dr Thorstad’s presentation at the Centre for Privacy Studies takes as a starting point the spaces and objects that mattered to people’s lives and could have influenced the way individuals interacted within a domestic setting. She will explore how different spaces produced different notions of privacy depending on the objects contained within a chamber, the people occupying it, and the activity being performed. She will argue that ultimately space and object can hold intrinsic meaning to people’s lives and thus shape their own notions of privacy.
Dr Audrey Thorstad studied History with a minor in medieval and Renaissance studies at the College of Saint Scholastica in Minnesota, where she received her B.A. with honours. She went on to receive her M.A. in Medieval History at the University of Leeds where she also pursued her Ph.D., which was awarded in 2015. She has taught at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and Chichester. In 2016, she was a research assistant at the University of Huddersfield. She commenced the post of lecturer in early modern history at Bangor in 2016. She researches social, cultural, and gender history of late medieval and early modern England, Wales, and Europe.
Dr Thorstad is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is on the Steering Committee for the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estate (http://iswe.bangor.ac.uk/). She is also on the Board of Trustees for the Castle Studies Trust (http://www.castlestudiestrust.org/).
A champion of interdisciplinary research, Dr Thorstad has been involved in a number of international collaborations. In 2013, she participated in a training school on using LiDAR to detect changes in pre-modern landscapes hosted and funded by the Università Degli Studi di Padova. In 2014, Dr Thorstad was invited to attend the ‘Dynamic Middle Ages’ hosted and funded by the National Research University in Moscow, Russia which brought together a number of researchers to discuss periodisation and cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. She has also collaborated with colleagues from Universitat Münster on a project that examines heraldry and heraldic programmes in ceremonial and public rooms in the medieval and early modern period. Her research on heraldry used in medieval and early modern castles featured in an edited volume produced from this project (https://www.thorbecke.de/heraldry-in-medieval-and-early-modern-state-rooms-p-2457.html?cPath=310_138_436).
She is especially interested in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, Wales, and France. Her recent work, The Culture of Castles in Tudor England and Wales (Boydell and Brewer, 2019), explores the use of space and the flow of movement in castles during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Her monograph challenges the traditional view of the castle as a purely medieval martial building and instead thinks about how people perform activities such as eating, sleeping, reading, farming, and politics.
The seminar is open to all. No registration required.