This network explores rent as a structuring force in everyday life. Led by scholars of Anglo-Saxon literature, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century urban history of Europe, and the geographies of modern Europe and North America, the network brings together participants from a range of specialisms in and beyond academia. We define ‘rent’ flexibly, and one of our objectives is to learn how these definitions intersect or compete. While it is deeply connected to matters of housing, tenancy has long played an equally important role in our understanding of landscape, and—via the voting power of the freeholder—of nation. Through a regular programme of roundtables, readings, film screenings, and a reading/writing group aimed at graduates, we will ask a series of questions:

• What characterises the relationship between tenant and landlord, from feudalism to the present?
• What do rental cultures reveal about the politics, poetics, 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? “

Co-directors: Matthew Ingleby (QMUL) and Ushashi Dasgupta (Oxford)