A Sensory History Manifesto

Mark M. Smith

Published by Penn State University Press 2021

A Sensory History Manifesto

Mark M. Smith

Volume 4 in the series Perspectives on Sensory History

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271092737

Overview
Contents

About this book

A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses.

Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a historical formation, Mark M. Smith traces the origins of historical work on the senses long before the emergence of the field now called “sensory history,” interrogating, exploring, and in some cases recovering pioneering work on the topic. Smith argues that we are at an important moment in the writing of the history of the senses, and he explains the potential that this field holds for the study of history generally. In addition to highlighting the strengths of current work in sensory history, Smith also identifies some of its shortcomings. If sensory history provides historians of all persuasions, times, and places a useful and incisive way to write about the past, it also challenges current practitioners to think more carefully about the historicity of the senses and the desirability—even the urgency—of engaged and sustained debate among themselves. In this way, A Sensory History Manifesto invites scholars to think about how their field needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of sensory history are to be realized.

Concise and convincing, A Sensory History Manifesto is a must-read for historians of all specializations.

Author / Editor information

Smith Mark M. :

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. An award-winning author of more than a dozen books, his work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Danish, and Spanish.

Reviews

“A Sensory History Manifesto is an impressively wide-ranging synthesis of some of the key developments in the field, covering the entire globe and all periods from antiquity to the present. It offers many excellent ideas for future interdisciplinary research, including engaging more fully with emerging animal–human interaction studies and with the hard sciences.”
—Tim Lockley, author of Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795-1874

“Mark M. Smith’s masterful command of sensory history is everywhere on display in this timely, insightful manifesto. Small in size but capacious in scope, this agenda-setting examination of the ‘state of the field’ surveys a wide range of historical work on the senses while identifying new directions for future scholarship. Conveying complex ideas with enviable simplicity, A Sensory History Manifesto is both an essential guide to the field and a compelling argument for its transformation.”
—Peter Denney, coeditor of Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
Chapter 2 Present Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
Chapter 3 Future Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 128
Keywords: Sensory history; Taste; touch; sound; smell; sight; historiography; senses

eBook

Published: May 10, 2021
ISBN: 9780271092737