‘Veiled Cities – Haunted Urban Realities’ puts the spotlight on hidden histories and uncanny cultures of art, architecture and spaces of memory, making the ‘Veiled City’ a potent site of urban alterity, artistic and social re-imagining. Spanning the globe, papers explore a secret Paris, Bruges and Rome, a haunted Nancy and London, extending to a ludic New Jersey and Mexico City.

We shed light on how and in what ways these and other key veiled cities – Colmar, Cologne, Berlin and Portuguese Dui – have an autonomous existence, their own character, not subsumed into other identities of nation and class. Thus, our core concern is to shed light on how this character is expressed through the city’s own traditions and its interlinked spaces and identities, to discover its hidden narratives, legends, its rituals and their imaginaries in architecture, art, print and images.

Papers illuminate ways in which the city is material, tangible, and the past is made immanent in its stones, in its relics to bring to visibility, neglected identities of the city across Europe and in key global interactions, as richly layered, containing many portals to other worlds – the past, the divine, the uncanny.

Our ambition in this Conference is to question assumptions that the urban is a world of ‘anonymity’ predicated on social and community fragmentation. While lives may be hidden, in rooms and courtyards or glimpsed fleetingly through doorways and windows, we challenge conceptions that such lives may be seen as empty or dislocated to understand the city – and its hidden communities, actors and sites – as a patchwork of secrets, mysteries and possibilities.

This conference is organised in partnership with the Maison Française d’Oxford.