Graduate Seminar
“Embodying the Senses in Art and Culture”
Dr. Constance Classen
Dr. David Howes
Friday, October 19, 2018
12:00–2:00 pm
Jackman Humanities Building (JH)
Room JHB1040 (10th floor)
170 St. George Street
Application required (link)
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis
Registration limited to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows
Lunch provided
Sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute
Supported by the The Archaeology Centre, Department of Anthropology, Department of History of Art/Graduate Department of Art, Department of History, Faculty of Information, Graduate Union of Student’s of Art, Northrop Frye Centre, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Constance Classen will present a brief talk on “Indigenous Aesthetics and the Senses”: What are some of the distinctive features of indigenous art forms? How are the senses engaged in indigenous aesthetics? What new forms of expression is this aesthetics taking today? How may such multimodal art be adequately showcased by museums? These and related questions will be explored within the context of the aesthetic traditions of the Andes, which are being given vibrant new forms of life by Andean artists and designers.
Constance Classen is a cultural historian specializing in the history of the senses. She is the author of The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections (Bloomsbury 2017) and The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch(University of Illinois Press 2012). She is also the general editor of the six-volume Cultural History of the Senses set (Bloomsbury 2014). Her earlier works include The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination(Routledge, 1998) and Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (Routledge, 1993). Dr. Classen is currently researching the sensory dimensions of traditional indigenous art forms and how these are finding new modes of expression in contemporary aesthetic practices.
David Howes will give a brief overview of his chapter on “Embodiment and the Senses” forthcoming in the Handbook of Sound Studies edited by Michael Bull. Copies of the paper will be distributed in advance to confirmed participants.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies, as well as the Director of the Concordia Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. Dr. Howes is the author of numerous works on the anthropology of the senses, including Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory(Michigan, 2003), and (with Constance Classen) Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (Routledge, 2013). He is the editor of Empire of the Senses (Berg, 2004), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2014), and the four-volume Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources Compendium (Bloomsbury, 2018), among other works. He is also a founding editor of the journal The Senses and Society.
Part of the “Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Methodology and Experience in the 21st Century” Series
Lecture #1 “Collecting Our Senses: Seeing, Hearing and Touching in the Museum” with Dr. Constance Classen
Thursday, October 18 @ 5:30 PM at Claude T. Bissell Building (BL), Room 728 (7th floor), 140 St. George Street
Lecture #2 “Sensory Ethnography: Between Art and Anthropology” with Dr. David Howes
Friday, October 19 @ 3:00 PM at Emmanuel College (EM), Room 119, 75 Queen’s Park
