The current housing crisis is, in many ways, a story of rent. Each day seems to bring further news about the struggle for renters’ rights, the impossibility of property ownership, and the often worrying condition of both social housing and accommodation on the private market. But these issues aren’t new, and they’ve taken on a variety of inflections across time and space. What’s more, we all experience rent in different ways: it might depend on our class, gender, race, sexuality, or immigration status, whether or not we have a disability, what stage of life we’re at, or where we are in the world. Writers, artists, and filmmakers have long been inspired by the unique relationship between tenant and landlord (or landlady), and they continue to ask what rent means for our definitions of home and our sense of ourselves. Rent has an extraordinarily diverse cultural history and a complex political and economic history. It also is one of the fundamental forces structuring our everyday lives.
The Rent Cultures Network is a collaborative project that explores these ideas from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We’re extremely fortunate to have two years’ funding and support from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and we’ve also benefited from the generosity of Pembroke College and Queen Mary University of London. Our network leads are based in the Faculties of English at QMUL, History at the University of Manchester, and English and Geography here at Oxford. I’m working with some brilliant colleagues: Will Clement, who is currently finishing a monograph about landlords’ and tenants’ engagement with the first state inspectors of unsanitary housing in nineteenth-century France; Matt Ingleby, who has published on Bloomsbury boarding-houses and is writing a book about rent cultures from the nineteenth century to the present; Daniel Thomas, who focuses on Early Medieval spatiality and literature; and Alex Vasudevan, whose wide-ranging research considers radical housing politics, squatting, and the global geographies of forced evictions. As for me, I’ve come to these ideas through Charles Dickens. Dickens’s fiction is striking for the sheer breadth of its references to tenancy, the verve with which it brings the ‘lodger world’ to life, and the extent to which it uses renting and lodging in playful ways—often to contemplate the nature of narrative itself. My colleagues and I have been thinking about rent for a while. But it’s becoming increasingly clear how many more of us there are, and just how exciting this field is. We felt it was time to join the dots.
So far, the Rent Cultures Network has hosted a series of events. We’re staying open-minded about what an individual ‘event’ might be and what our broader programme might look like. We’ve organised two panels: our launch, ‘Writing Rent Now’ at QMUL, featured a conversation with the writers Rachael Allen and Holly Pester about Holly’s phenomenal new novel, The Lodgers (2024). (Do read it!). For our next panel, ‘Housing Harm’ at Pembroke College, we were delighted to welcome Ciara Breathnach (Chair of Irish Gender History at University College Cork) and Sharda Rozena (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Urban and Human Geography at Sheffield). Sharing their research on housing, negligence, and danger, Ciara and Sharda drew fascinating connections between contemporary London and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin. At an informal workshop, we invited participants to reflect on a couple of questions and, in doing so, to bring us back to first principles: ‘What does rent mean to you? How are you thinking about it, personally and in your academic work?’. Over Michaelmas Term, we’ve mainly turned our attention to the cultural representations of rent in America. A group of us saw and discussed Headlong’s production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959) at the Oxford Playhouse; as many readers will know, this classic play by Lorraine Hansberry probes the intersections between racism and housing injustice on the South Side of Chicago. Finally, in the lead-up to the end of term, we screened Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960): a movie that not only perfectly balances comedy, tragedy, romance, and social critique, but also has astute things to say about bachelorhood, cohabitation, and spatial negotiations and transactions. We’re grateful to Sos Eltis and Reidar Due, whose expertise on theatre and film enriched our understanding of what we were seeing. We’re now making plans for further screenings, themed panel discussions, and workshops, as well as a student reading group.
When we first started putting the project together, I realised that I didn’t really know what a network was. Now that we’re a year (or so) into the process, I see what we’re doing as a kind of choreography. It’s an honour to meet people from different career stages, to bring them into one place, and to listen to what they have to say about a common interest. This feels like a different way to do research. It’s something that complements our writing, but is ultimately rooted in conversation. I’m finding it intriguing to see what interdisciplinarity looks like in practice—and, equally, to learn just how roomy, how hospitable, English can be. Situating my own work in these fresh contexts is proving to be very valuable. We’re actively encouraging each other to test the lines between research and lived experience, while acknowledging the problems that come with privileging some experiences over others. We’re especially eager to move beyond academia, and one of our ongoing aims is to figure out how best to do that. As the network grows, we want to make sure that we’re framing our questions globally.
We’re also building up our presence online. To learn about our work funded by TORCH, please visit: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/rent-cultures-network. You can find out more about the wider project at: https://rentcultures.org. We’ve been mentioned in the Guardian. And if you’d like to join our mailing list, get involved, or share your rental stories, do write to us at: rentcultures@torch.ox.ac.uk. We’d love to hear from you!
— Dr Ushashi Dasgupta
Ushashi is Associate Professor of English at the Faculty, the Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College, and the author of Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World (OUP, 2020).
