Routledge History of the Senses

Andrew Kettler taught as an Assistant Professor and Early American History Fellow at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019 before serving as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2019-2020 academic year. He currently teaches at the University of South Carolina- Palmetto College. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (2020), focuses on the development of racist semantics concerning miasma and the contrasting expansion of aromatic consciousness in the making of subaltern resistance to racialized olfactory discourses of state, religious, and slave masters.Will Tullett is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York. He has published two books on the history of smell - Smell in Eighteenth Century England (2019) and Smell and the Past (2023) - and many articles on sensory history. He was recently part of Odeuropa, a major EU-funded project on smell and heritage in Europe from the 1600s to the 1920s.

'Students and scholars alike will welcome this collection in one of the most innovative research fields of recent decades. Essays combine synthetic introductions and new inquiry, with a challenging overall argument about the constrictions of modernity.' - Dr. Peter Stearns, George Mason University'Kettler and Tullett have assembled an impressive set of essays that range from perfume to pallesthesia, and from coconut oil to conquistadors. At once fascinating and challenging, they offer the reader so many reasons to (re)think about sensory histories.' - Professor Jon Stobart, Manchester Metropolitan University

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsIntroduction: Radicalizing the Body, Haunting the ArchiveAndrew KettlerSection One – Historiography of the Western Senses1) Sight: Trajan’s Column: A Site, a Sight, a Way of SeeingA. Joan Saab2) Sound: Of Bells, Gramophones, and… Empire? Approaches to the Sonic PastJared Asser3) The Paradoxical Sense: The Role of Touch in HistoryAgalia Venters4) Histories of Taste and Tasting HistoryWill Tullett5) Smell: Re-odorizing History: A Historiography of Smell StudiesKatelynn RobinsonSection Two – Beyond the Five6) Senselessness: The Politics of Unfeeling from Ancient Greece to the PresentRob Boddice7) Synaesthesia: The Sensory Landscapes of 1860-1920Mira Stolpe Törneman8) The Vibration Sense: Pallaesthesia, Sensory Substitution Design, and the Reformation of a Sixth Sense in the Early Twentieth CenturyClemens Finkelstein9) A Sixth SenseRenee Bricker and Carol LevinSection Three – Perceptual Theories10) Darsan and Sensory Immersion: Exploring Gaze in Hindu Religious TraditionsSneha Haldar11) Aesthetics as Aistethics: Transforming the Original Conception of Aesthetics as Sensory Episteme to Sensory Perception as Relation of Action, Knowing and BeingJayanthan Sriram12) A Most Thrilling Geometry (Predicative Space in Proust)Tim Flanagan13) Olfactive Paradigms of Air Quality: From the Great Stink to Odourless ParticulatesAmin HashemiSection Four – Sensorial Othering14) Medieval Race and the Senses: Sensing Race in Medieval Literature and Revisiting Richard Coer de LyonAnnette Kern-Stähler and Hannah Piercy15) Touching Off a Moral Panic: The Case of Lord O.Bennett Gilbert16) “A Touch of the Real Chinese Character”: Hearing Race in Nineteenth-Century British Descriptions of Chinese MusicSam Cheney17) ‘Thook Jihad’: Making Sense of Disgust and Spit in IndiaHeba AhmedSection Five – Consumption and Commodities 18) Consuming Scents of Place: Coconut Oil, Colonisation and the Changing Value of Sensory CommoditiesKate Stevens19) Sensory Marketing: Engaging the Senses from Desire to PurchaseCurt Lund20) From Coumarou to New-Mown-Hay. A Cultural History of Coumarin Across the Atlantic (17th-20th c.)Manon Raffard21) Living Made Easy: The Fashionable Flâneur’s Accessory for Avoiding City Stench, Miasma, Filth, “the Other,” and the Lower ClassesKris Belden AdamsSection Six – Science, Medicine, and the Senses22) Touch, Teaching and Controversy in the Work of Andreas VesaliusAllen Shotwell23) Knowing and Healing through the Senses: The Teaching of Medicine at the Universities of Coimbra and Salamanca (XVIII-XIX)Carlos Alves24) Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting TouchYijie Huang25) Uncovering Annihilation in Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Asylum 1943-44Maia NicholsSection Seven – Sensory Media26) Stroking Followed by Smashing: The Transformation of Touch from Tender to Violent in the Iconoclasm of the ReformationNausikaä El-Mecky27) ‘The most bizarre invention of our century’. Imagining the Phonograph in Polish Press in 1877–1879Marta Michalska28) Stepping Outside the Cinema and into the Cinematic: Theatre Songs and Azaan in KeralaShahal Bilavin29) Interfacing Optic Visuality, Erotic Sensoriality and Haptic Spatiality in Richa Kaul Padte’s Cyber Sexy: Rethinking PornographyAbishek GhosalSection Eight – Military, Government, and Diplomacy 30) The Senses in the Conquest and Colonisation of Spanish AmericaMary Katherine Newman31) Extreme Sensations: The Sensory Experience of War in North America (1754–1760) Clément Monseigne32) The Great Exodus of 1971: Towards Sensing the Liminality of Bengal Borderlands through Aesthetic RegistersSushrita Acharjee33) Sensory BorderlandsChris BlakleyConclusion: Sensation and Speed: The Death of the Historical BodyAndrew KettlerIndex