THIS EVENT WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR SPRING 2026

Please join the Environmental Humanities Working Group at our meeting on Tuesday, November 4, 2pm to 3pm, in THH 309K, where we will discuss work in progress from Emma Jahoda-Brown (Anthropology): "History of Smell and the Environment".

We’ll circulate the draft via the working group email list a week before the meeting. To join the Environmental Humanities Working Group email list, follow these instructions.

Abstract: How has smell impacted human beings' experiences of their environment? This paper will be a literature review of how scholars have explored the relationship between human smell and their environments. Surveying work in anthropology, psychology, environmental law, cultural studies and other fields, this paper will track how smell and the environment have been written about over time. Smell has generally been considered less in scholarly literature than the other senses (Cobb 2020) however people who lose their sense of smell have reported feeling disconnected from the world around them (Ives 2022). Loss of “smellscapes”, an odor landscape generated from a particular place, has been connected to loss of language (O’Meara 2016). Additionally, memory is deeply tied to smell and social experience (Mouly 2010, Beer 2015). This paper will be a review of previous works on smell as well as suggest new directions for the study of olfaction in anthropology moving forward.