Rent Cultures Network

This network will run from 2024 to 2026.

This TORCH network explores rent as a structuring force in everyday life. It is clear that the global housing crisis is, in many ways, a story of rent. Rent and ownership feature regularly in discussions about economic precarity and social mobility. But such issues are far from new, and have looked different over time. And while it is deeply connected to matters of housing, tenancy has long played an equally important role in our understanding of landscape, nation, and empire.

Led by scholars of Early Medieval literature, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century European urban history, and contemporary urban politics, we’re bringing together participants from a range of specialisms in and beyond academia to think about ‘rent’ in a broad way. Our conversations will cross historical, geographical, and disciplinary lines, and will create a space to consider tenants’ stories. We define ‘rent’ flexibly, and one of our objectives is to learn how these definitions intersect or compete.

Through a regular programme of roundtables, workshops, play readings, film screenings, and a reading/writing group aimed at graduates, we will be asking a series of questions:

• What characterises the relationship between tenant and landlord, from the Early Medieval period to the present?
• What do rental cultures reveal about the politics, poetics, and phenomenologies of space and place?
• What happens when our sense of ‘home’ is time-limited, paid for, and bound by the terms of a legal agreement?
• How might class, disability, gender, immigration status, race, and sexuality mediate the way rent is experienced?
• Under what circumstances does rent become exploitative? What alternative or positive valences can it have?

This TORCH network is part of a broader project co-hosted with the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. For news and updates on our activities outside Oxford, please see https://rentcultures.org. And to join our mailing list, drop us a line at rentcultures@torch.ox.ac.uk.

Network Leads

Will Clement, Faculty of History

Ushashi Dasgupta, Faculty of English

Daniel Thomas, Faculty of English

Alex Vasudevan, School of Geography and the Environment