Event Details

In the sixth installment of our History Research Seminars this year, we will host William Tullett, from Anglia Ruskin University, who will deliver the paper 'The Past, Historians, and Smell: Noses, Texts, and Objects'.

In the last twenty or thirty years there has been a growing interest in smell – and the senses in general – within the humanities and social sciences. David Howes, an anthropologist at the forefront of these developments, has even described this as a ‘sensory revolution’ in scholarship. However, despite a growing interest in the smells of the past, many historians tend to dismiss attempts to use noses and smells as part of the historian’s work. We still rely on reading texts, images, and objects for past smells and then communicating our findings in articles, chapters, and books. In this paper I will argue that, contrary to such claims, historians would be better off if we did deploy our noses. To do so, historians should be ready to collaborate across – and learn from – other disciplines. They should be prepared to question some of the assumptions that have haunted academic historical study since the nineteenth century. Turning to smell allows historians to encounter our archives, present our arguments, and engage with publics in new, illuminating, ways that still retain a high degree of methodological sophistication and intellectual rigour. If historians refuse to engage their senses with the past, other disciplines will do so for us.