The Routledge History of the Senses presents readers with an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers a considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience.
The handbook brings together essays and case studies from some of the leading academics on the history of the senses. Together, they not only chart topics and arguments in existing scholarship but introduce fresh methodologies for future analyses. Specifically, the chapters collectively show that the senses of the historical body often portray the intensity of the invasion of capital upon the functions of the mind throughout global history. As a global history, this work arrives at a time when many sensory historians are looking for a touchstone for moving beyond the often heavily Western frameworks that dominate the existing literature on the historical senses.
Not only will this book appeal to students and scholars of the history of senses, visual studies, art history, food studies, and many of the social sciences, but individual chapters also offer useful reading material for a wide range of history modules and contemporary topics.
The Routledge History of the Senses presents readers an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers a considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: Radicalizing the Body, Haunting the Archive
Andrew Kettler
Section One Historiography of the Western Senses
1) Sight: Trajans Column: A Site, a Sight, a Way of Seeing
A. Joan Saab
2) Sound: Of Bells, Gramophones, and Empire? Approaches to the Sonic Past
Jared Asser
3) The Paradoxical Sense: The Role of Touch in History
Agalia Venters
4) Histories of Taste and Tasting History
Will Tullett
5) Smell: Re-odorizing History: A Historiography of Smell Studies
Katelynn Robinson
Section Two Beyond the Five
6) Senselessness: The Politics of Unfeeling from Ancient Greece to the
Present
Rob Boddice
7) Synaesthesia: The Sensory Landscapes of 1860-1920
Mira Stolpe Törneman
8) The Vibration Sense: Pallaesthesia, Sensory Substitution Design, and the
Reformation of a Sixth Sense in the Early Twentieth Century
Clemens Finkelstein
9) A Sixth Sense
Renee Bricker and Carol Levin
Section Three Perceptual Theories
10) Darsan and Sensory Immersion: Exploring Gaze in Hindu Religious
Traditions
Sneha Haldar
11) Aesthetics as Aistethics: Transforming the Original Conception of
Aesthetics as Sensory Episteme to Sensory Perception as Relation of Action,
Knowing and Being
Jayanthan Sriram
12) A Most Thrilling Geometry (Predicative Space in Proust)
Tim Flanagan
13) Olfactive Paradigms of Air Quality: From the Great Stink to Odourless
Particulates
Amin Hashemi
Section Four Sensorial Othering
14) Medieval Race and the Senses: Sensing Race in Medieval Literature and
Revisiting Richard Coer de Lyon
Annette Kern-Stähler and Hannah Piercy
15) Touching Off a Moral Panic: The Case of Lord O.
Bennett Gilbert
16) A Touch of the Real Chinese Character: Hearing Race in
Nineteenth-Century British Descriptions of Chinese Music
Sam Cheney
17) Thook Jihad: Making Sense of Disgust and Spit in India
Heba Ahmed
Section Five Consumption and Commodities
18) Consuming Scents of Place: Coconut Oil, Colonisation and the Changing
Value of Sensory Commodities
Kate Stevens
19) Sensory Marketing: Engaging the Senses from Desire to Purchase
Curt Lund
20) From Coumarou to New-Mown-Hay. A Cultural History of Coumarin Across the
Atlantic (17th-20th c.)
Manon Raffard
21) Living Made Easy: The Fashionable Flâneurs Accessory for Avoiding City
Stench, Miasma, Filth, the Other, and the Lower Classes
Kris Belden Adams
Section Six Science, Medicine, and the Senses
22) Touch, Teaching and Controversy in the Work of Andreas Vesalius
Allen Shotwell
23) Knowing and Healing through the Senses: The Teaching of Medicine at the
Universities of Coimbra and Salamanca (XVIII-XIX)
Carlos Alves
24) Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting
Touch
Yijie Huang
25) Uncovering Annihilation in Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Asylum 1943-44
Maia Nichols
Section Seven Sensory Media
26) Stroking Followed by Smashing: The Transformation of Touch from Tender to
Violent in the Iconoclasm of the Reformation
Nausikaä El-Mecky
27) The most bizarre invention of our century. Imagining the Phonograph in
Polish Press in 18771879
Marta Michalska
28) Stepping Outside the Cinema and into the Cinematic: Theatre Songs and
Azaan in Kerala
Shahal Bilavin
29) Interfacing Optic Visuality, Erotic Sensoriality and Haptic Spatiality in
Richa Kaul Padtes Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography
Abishek Ghosal
Section Eight Military, Government, and Diplomacy
30) The Senses in the Conquest and Colonisation of Spanish America
Mary Katherine Newman
31) Extreme Sensations: The Sensory Experience of War in North America
(17541760) Clément Monseigne
32) The Great Exodus of 1971: Towards Sensing the Liminality of Bengal
Borderlands through Aesthetic Registers
Sushrita Acharjee
33) Sensory Borderlands
Chris Blakley
Conclusion: Sensation and Speed: The Death of the Historical Body
Andrew Kettler
Index
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.
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