Smell and the Past - by William Tullett

Book Synopsis

What if researchers interested in 'the past' used their noses? This open access book makes the case for a more imaginatively interdisciplinary approach to sensory heritage and history, arguing that we can and should engage our noses as a research tool for articulating the past.

Assessing how both we and our ancestors approach, understand and conceptualise smell, Tullett shows how archives can be 're-odorized' to uncover narratives that are only implicit in or obscured by the historical record. From perfume libraries to organic compounds emitted by historical objects, this book acts as a guide for employing our olfactory senses when researching and studying history in order to understand and communicate the past more fully. Employing 'olfactory figures' examples, Smell and the Past shows how historical narratives and arguments can be found through a structured olfactory experience, and demonstrates how our understanding of the past and its relationship with the present is enriched by opening our minds and using our noses.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program project ODEUROPA under grant agreement number 101004469.

Review Quotes

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

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

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

About the Author

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.