The traditional distinction between five major senses places vision at the top of the sensory order as if it the location of human eyes near the top of the head justified the visual supremacy over the other senses. Focusing on sensory interplays, this workshop investigates the role of multimodal perceptions in communications about the living, human body in medical and literary culture. The overarching aim is to harness interdisciplinary approaches to, and help to reevaluate, the role of human senses in these fields. The initiative is funded by the Zukunftskolleg.

You are warmly invited to attend the event. (Attendance is free.)

Contact: monika.class[at]uni-konstanz.de

Program:

July 29

  • Monika Class: Introduction
  • Nicolas Pethes (Cologne): Remote Control: Pedagogical, Fictional, Physiological, and Psychological Experiments on Producing Emotions
  • Neil Vickers (King’s College London): Late Foucault and Multimodal Sensory Perception
  • Bonnie Evans (Queen Mary, University of London): Psychology, Autism and Sensory Impairment in England 1959-1981
  • Brian Hurwitz (King’s College London): Narrating Order in Modern Clinical Case Reports
  • Maria Böhmer (Zurich): More than Seeing. The Interplay of the Senses in the Observationes Genre

July 30       

  • Aleida Assmann (Constance): The Eye and the Ear as Rivals
  • Meegan Kennedy (Florida State): Imagination and the Transposition of the Senses: Making the Audible Knowable in Auscultation and Percussion
  • Olivia Vázquez-Medina (Royal Holloway, University of London): Sensing the Foreign City in Contemporary Mexican Literature
  • Emily Petermann (Constance): The Problem of Sensory Information in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Edgar Huntly
  • Ruth Richardson (London): Common Sense in a Malodorous Victorian Charitable Institution: A Mid-Victorian Case Report
  • Silvia Mergenthal (Constance): How the Other Half Smells: Odorphobia in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier

July 31

  • Marc Lafrance (Concordia): Sensitive Skins: Didier Anzieu and the Sensory Life of the Body’s Surface
  • Monika Class (Constance): ‘Strength through That Human Contact’: The Figurative Skin of Characters in Victorian Novels
  • Discussion