About this Event
Public Lecture: “The Elephant in the Room: A Talk by Dr Elizabeth Darling"
What happens when we pay attention to absence?
In this lecture, Elizabeth takes a journey through sites that are actual — a housing scheme in west London, the Old Town of Edinburgh — or mediated — an advertising pamphlet, a publicity photograph — to ask by seeing and acknowledging the voids in the frameworks through which architecture is typically discussed, we can move to the possibility of modes of historical writing that turn absence into presence.
This re-casting of history allows us to see architecture as a wider set of practices, which have — and do — embed it in the making of modern life.
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Elizabeth Darling is an architectural historian, curator, and writer specialising in histories of modernist cultures in Britain, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, and is an expert on women and architecture from the 1890s to the present day. Her research focuses on inter-war modernism, the environments of social welfare reform, and gender and very often the intersections among all these things. Her publications include Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (Routledge, 2007), Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 (Ashgate, 2007, co-edited with Lesley Whitworth), Wells Coates (RIBA Publications, 2012) and Suffragette City, Women, Politics, and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2020; co-edited with Nathaniel Walker) as well as numerous articles for journals including the Journal of British Studies and Gender and History. She serves as adviser to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on widening the coverage of women architects. Her new book, to be published in June by Lund Humphries, is Palace of the Ether, Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932.
Dr Elizabeth Darling's public lecture and participation in the 2026 SAHANZ/AUHPH Absence Conference is supported by the at the University of Melbourne.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lecture Theatre 1 (B117), Melbourne School of Design, Masson Road, The University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus, Melbourne, Australia
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