This seminar examines the relationship among women’s mobility, domestic space, and property restoration. Nowadays these phenomena encompass literature, memoir, film, television, and digital culture. Examples of this multi-mediatic genre range from Daphne Phelps’s A House in Sicily, Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun, Annie Hawes’s Extra Virgin, Patricia Atkinson’s The Ripening Sun, and Suzanna Clarke’s A House in Fez to fictional and cinematic narratives such as Brick Lane, Small Island, Land, and Falling Inn Love. In most of these narratives, and the reason why they are told, reinventing a home means reinventing the self, and this reconstruction of homes and lives takes different forms across national, racial, and economic contexts.

We hope to analyze narratives that address fictional and nonfictional stories of women moving abroad, returning to ancestral places, inhabiting second homes, or renovating abandoned or deteriorating properties.

In this seminar, we shall try to understand travel narratives and home rescue and repair from a material, financial, environmental, and gendered labour points of view, and we ask what economic, legal, environmental, and social conditions make real estate and life reinvention possible. We hope to explore how women restore their new homes while negotiating bureaucracy, solitude, community, learning a different language and belonging to two places at once. 

We look for comparative approaches to investigate migration and privilege, land ownership and domestic labour, abandoned places, and the difference between a tourist and a dweller. We hope to look at mobility studies as they pertain to feminist theory and the ethics of care. Ultimately, this seminar wishes to explore the notion that rebuilding and caring for a new home abroad might be its own form of world-making.