The Mobile Domestic Servant: Gender, Class, Language, Mobility

TRANSITION Seminar

TRANSITION invites scholars and other experts for a two-day seminar

Photos: Unsplash

The seminar focuses on the female domestic servant as a figure through whom relations between mobility, place and societal transformation can be explored. As research suggests, domestic servants moved considerably greater distances than most other social groups. Their mobility was geographical (young women left rural communities for employment in towns and cities) but also social (domestic service brought women into intimate contact with forms of living different from their own).

We invite contributions from across disciplines including history, ethnology, literary studies, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, gender studies and migration studies.  Contributions may address historical or contemporary material and may be empirical, theoretical, or methodological.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Domestic service and geographical or social mobility
  • Gendered and classed relations within the household
  • Rural–urban migration and encounters
  • Housemaids, language, and linguistic change
  • Literary, archival and media representations of domestic servants
  • Domestic morality, hygiene, and ideals of femininity
  • Vulnerability, sexuality, and prostitution
  • Au pairs, migrant domestic workers, and contemporary forms of domestic service
  • The household as a site of belonging, exclusion, and nation-building
  • Terminology and the housemaid as a linguistic and cultural figure
  • Domestic service, urbanisation and changing rural–urban relations.
  • Life trajectories and everyday experiences of societal transition

Presentations will be allocated 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. To apply, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, together with your name, affiliation, and contact information, to transition@hum.ku.dk by no later than 4 October.

Read the entire call for papers

Applicants will be notified by 15 October.

The working language of the seminar is English. 

Practical information

When: 30 November – 1 December 2026

Where: South Campus, University of Copenhagen

Application deadline: 4 October 2026

Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2026

Participation in the seminar is free of charge. Participants are responsible for arranging and covering their own travel and accommodation.

For further inquiries, please send an e-mail to transition@hum.ku.dk