From H-Material Culture:
On Saturday April 20, 2013, the Hagley Museum and Library will host, “Ways of Knowing the World: History and the Senses,” a conference sponsored by the Hagley Fellows of the University of Delaware.
The conference will bring together a diverse group of scholars and the public to explore the historical and cultural role of sensory perception in the human experience—including those that look beyond the Aristotelian conception of the five senses. Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina, will deliver the keynote address. He will discuss his new work on sensory history and the American Civil War.
PROGRAM
INDUSTRY AND THE SENSES (9:00 am-11:00 am)
Nadia Berenstein (University of Pennsylvania), “Tasting Success: Training for a Job in Flavors, 1954-1984”
Gerard J. Fitzgerald (George Mason University), “‘Lots of folks nearly drove ‘em crazy…’ Soundscapes, Sensory Experience, and the Lives of Southern Mill Hands, 1915-1940”
Anna Thompson Hajdik (University of Wisconsin, Whitewater), “Stock Yard Panoramas and Superlative Spectacles of Animal Disassembly: Chicago’s Packing House Tourism at the Turn of the 20th Century”
EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTIONS (11:00 am-1:00 pm)
Alicia Puglionesi (John’s Hopkins University), “The Astonishment of Experiment: Negotiating the Extra-Sensory in Early-Twentieth-Century America”
Richard Steven Nash (John’s Hopkins University), “Bat Bombs and Interphones: Donald Redfield Griffin’s Research during World War II”
Matthias Klestil, “In the Eyes of the Slaves: On the Visual Regimes and Rhetorics of the Antebellum Slave Narrative”
DESIGNING SENSORY EXPERIENCE (2:00 pm-4:00 pm)
Jeremy Blatter (Harvard University) and Lee Vinsel (Stevens Institute of Technology) , “Light, Signal, and Semaphore: Psychology, Senses, and Safety in the Age of Mechanical Transportation”
Sarah Tracy (University of Toronto), “Democratizing Delicious? MSG and Post-Humanist Rumination on Taste”
Paul Gansky (University of Texas, Austin), “Palpable Privacy: Telephony and Sensory Regulations in Public”
KEYNOTE ADDRESS (4:00 pm-5:00 pm)
Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina
To register, please visit our website:
http://www.udel.edu/hagley/events/conferences/fellowsconference.html
If you have any questions, please contact Hagley Fellows (hagley.fellows@gmail.com).