Tag Archives: Modernity

Logo of Expression Sensible

Expression Sensible

By Rémi Digonnet

Sensory Expression/Expression Sensible aims to be a digital space, with no anchorage in any specific space or time, dedicated to discussions about the senses and their expressions. It is a paradox to try to express a sensory world digitally; to question sensory expression in this way is undoubtedly a challenge, but the constraint of the digital can offer at the same time a useful critical distance from the sensory domain. This tension between the apparent immediacy felt through the senses and their mediated formulations calls into question this double articulation between the experienced and perceived senses on the one hand and the mediated and translated senses on the other. What kind of adequation exists between them, or rather, what kind of inadequacy is generated by such a tension? Besides advertising recent publications on the senses, scientific events, or sensory cartographies, the journal intends to publish thematic issues dedicated to the senses and their expressions.

Project Website

Swearing day at the Weinhof in Ulm. Gouache by Jonas Arnold (um 1650)

“Sensory Communities”

By Prof. Dr. Philip Hahn

Full title: Sensory Communities: Perception, Order, and Community Building in the Early Modern Town, ca. 1480-1880

The timeframe of this book project is deliberately broad and proposes an over-long early modern period. Spatially, it is the opposite, as it offers a case study on Ulm, a middle-sized free imperial city (until 1802/03) on the river Danube. The goal of this study is to uncover long-term transformations and short-term changes in the meaning and function of sense perception in urban society over 400 years. While it is meant principally as a contribution to urban history, the book will also relate to research in the history of natural science and medicine, environmental history, the history of religiosity and confessionalization, and the cultural history of politics.

Project Website (Universität des Saarlandes)

Logo of SENSIS. The Senses of Islam.

SENSIS. The Senses of Islam

By Prof. Dr. Christian Lange (Contact: C.R.Lange@uu.nl)

Funded by Utrecht University

SENSIS, Utrecht University’s Islamic sensory history research project, works toward a cultural history of the senses in the Islamic world, from the emergence of Islam in the 7th century CE to the 20th century. Focusing on the early centuries of Islamic history, phase 1 of this project, “The Senses of Islam,” ran from 2017 to 2022 and resulted in the publication of the Handbook of Islamic Sensory History, 600-1500 (Leiden-Boston, 2024). Phase 2, “Rosewater, Nightingale, and Gunpowder” (2023-2028), deals with the three early modern empires often referred to as the “gunpowder empires”: the Ottoman Empire (c. 1281–1924), the Safavid Empire (c. 1501–1722) and the Mughal Empire (c. 1526–1858). Phase 2 will lead to the publication of a Handbook of Islamic Sensory History, 16th-20th Centuries (Leiden-New York, fc.).

Project Website

(Past) Lecture Series: “The Senses in History” at Freie Universität, Berlin

The Senses in History. New Perspectives from Antiquity to Modernity [German: Die Sinne in der Geschichte. Neue Perspektiven von der Antike bis zur Moderne]
April to July 2024 at Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut.
Continue reading (Past) Lecture Series: “The Senses in History” at Freie Universität, Berlin