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  • Wednesday, March 22, 2023 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: Zoom


Professor Korda's lecture examines the diminutive world-making capacity of early modern doll or “baby” houses, and the intimate forms of imaginative and interactive play they afforded in the everyday lives of women. By taking into account the ways in which scale shapes the social (re)production of gendered space, and the ideological division of labor and leisure in everyday life, the paper aims to make room in our historical and theoretical archives for forms of female play and performance, care and closeness, as they shaped and reshaped the relationship between female privacy and publicity. Continually reimagined, remade, reassembled and restaged, early modern women’s doll houses help to model a reconceptualization of what counts as an “archive” or a “stage,” and how the quotidian forms of intellectual work and performative play they enabled might transform the disciplinary parameters of early modern theatre and performance historiography.