AHSS Lunchtime Research Webinar with Dr Tullett on Olfaction, the Archive, and Interdisciplinary Pasts.

In this talk Dr William Tullett will draw on emerging work on olfaction and heritage to make the case for a new approach to history that brings together the textual, material, and chemical. This approach involves historians considering how they might use their noses. As this talk will show, the refusal to use the nose as part of the historical method is bound up with the longer history of the humanities and the historical discipline. Dr Tullett makes the case that historians miss out by not using their noses. In the approach that he advocates, close and distant smelling are just as important as the close and distant reading that historians and other humanities scholars are so used to employing in their work. Comparing smell with sight and sound reveals that many of the platitudes we commonly use to characterise smell are simply wrong or apply to all of the senses. He therefore challenges scholars of the senses and emotions to think more critically about how they might use their senses in their work.

This talk stems from a mini monograph which Dr Tullett is currently writing as part of the initial stage of the EU Horizon 2020 funded ‘Odeuropa’ project. The project aims to understand, preserve and recreate Europe’s olfactory heritage from 1600 to the early twentieth century. The mini monograph aims to chart the past, present, and future of the interdisciplinary study of past smells and ways of smelling.

Looking forward to meeting you there

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