Smell and the Past

Beautifully written and packed with memorable and odiferous examples, Smell and the Past sensitizes readers to diverse olfactory methods and archives that have often been neglected by historians. Tullett makes a persuasive case for the importance of smell as an embodied encounter, a sense that realizes human and more-than-human relationships across the “molecular commons.” * Hsuan L. Hsu, Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA *
Smell and the Past is a provocative challenge to scholars thinking with or about olfaction and the past. Tullett pushes historians to use their noses, actually sniffing out new archives and sources, and offers helpful tips for anyone to get started. * Melanie A. Kiechle, Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech, USA *
From a 1968 Aston Martin car interior to nineteenth Japanese and Chinese incense clocks, Tullett has a flair for olfactory scene-setting – both though narrative vignettes and ‘Olfactory Figures’ (items to sniff as you read) as he constructs arguments for direct sensory engagement in historical research. A superb, accessible nudge for humanities scholars to simply follow their noses. * Kate McLean, Researcher and Creator of international smellmaps, University of Kent, UK *

William Tullett is Associate Professor in Sensory History at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He is the author of Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (2019) and a number of articles on the history of smell, sound, and the senses. He is currently helping to lead the EU Horizon 2020 project ‘Odeuropa’, which seeks to trace the history and heritage of smell in Europe from the 1600s to the early 1900s.

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