The Routledge History of the Senses

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction: Radicalizing the Body, Haunting the Archive

Andrew Kettler

Section One – Historiography of the Western Senses

1)  Sight: Trajan’s 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 Flâneur’s 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 1877–1879

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 Padte’s 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 (1754–1760) 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

Biography

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