Fall 2012 Shannon Lectures

The Shannon Lectures in History is a series of thematically linked public lectures offered annually at Carleton University made possible through the Shannon Donation to the Department of History.

The objectives of the series include:

exploring the social dimension of the past, especially the social history of Canada

demonstrating the linkages between approaches to Canadian history and international scholarship

encouraging cooperation and collegiality between different communities of historians in Canada

popularizing innovative historical methods and practices, and conveying them in a manner accessible to a general audience

The theme for the Fall of 2012 Shannon Lectures is Making Sense: History and the Sensory Past

"Our senses have histories. Practices of vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste are not universal biological experiences. Rather, they belong to socially constructed ways of knowing that have changed over time and across diverse cultural contexts. Recognizing sensory perception as both a physical and a cultural act encourages us to historicize human bodies; it compels us to think about how the embodied practices through which we know the world are historically and culturally specific. Sensory histories investigate how the senses have influenced the social relations and cultural formations of various historical periods; how the senses have contributed to understandings of gender, race, class, ability and other constructions of identity; how discourses about normative sensory experience have been politically deployed; and how the senses have shaped human experiences of the physical environment.

Historians and other scholars are increasingly looking to the senses to understand the past. As a dynamic cultural mode of analysis, sensory histories are expanding the purview of social and cultural history. By devoting the 2012 Shannon Lectures to an historical examination of the senses, we hope to encourage a wide-ranging engagement with this burgeoning field of historical study. Spanning several regions and historical periods, our invited scholars will bring a range of interdisciplinary scholarly traditions to bear on the senses. Their innovative work will illuminate the ways that sense research might enlarge our understanding of both the past and the present and contribute to the ongoing formation of social and cultural histories, in Canada and beyond."

Read about the speakers at http://www2.carleton.ca/history/events/shannon-lecture/shannon-lectures-2012/speakers/

The schedule is not yet available.