Introduction

This special issue of Interiors: Stage and Screen focuses on interiors (very broadly defined) in both films and plays. It grew out of an initiative taken in late 2015 at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, to help foster a greater degree of cross-pollination across the research, publishing, and teaching undertaken there by historians of design and historians of film and media, as well as by art and design practitioners and theorists, including those specialising in interior design. The initiative sought to help remove disciplinary blinkers. Within film and television studies in the academy, the study of sets for interiors and the objects within them have tended to be neglected compared to most other aspects of those fields, just as design historians have tended to marginalise design related to film and television. A major outcome of that initiative was an undertaking by the university’s Modern Interiors Research Centre (MIRC, founded 2005) to hold an international symposium on the topic of interiors in film and television and to follow that up with a publication. Discussions with colleagues in the School of Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) at Parsons School of Design (The New School) and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, led to a co-sponsored international symposium around the expansive topic of Interiors: Film, Television, and Stage. It was In te rio rs D O I: 10 .1 08 0/ 20 41 91 12 .2 01 9. 16 71 65 1