Material Culture and the Bodily Senses: Past and Present

How do the senses shape our experience? How many senses are there? How do ancient and modern art and material culture relate to bodily senses? What is material and sensorial memory, and how does it structure time and temporality? Using media and objects, including archaeological and ethnographic collections at Brown and beyond, this course will study how a sensorial perspective on materiality can reshape and reinvigorate research dealing with past and present material culture. Furthermore, we will explore how sensoriality and affectivity can decenter the dominant western modernist canon of the autonomous individual.