Kolloquium: Emotionalized Odours – Polish Smellscapes under Transition

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Stephanie Weismann, University of Vienna

Emotionalized Odours. Polish Smellscapes under Transition.

The talk focusses on selected micro-spaces of everyday life and their respective smellscapes in order to “feel out” peoples’ expectations and their failure to be met in a broader socio-cultural context. Of all senses, smell is the most affective and thus strongly linked with emotions. Sniffing out the urban courtyard of the 1920s and the private bathroom of the 1990s gives us a sense of what was in the air. Both the stench of pig excrement and the aroma of German shampoo generated sensitivities and feelings that are crucially bound to the socio-political transitions in East Central Europe in the 20th century.

Stephanie Weismann is a Hertha Firnberg-Fellow (FWF) at the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna with a project on “The Smellscapes of Lublin: an Olfactory Urban History of the 20th Century in East Central Europe”. She studied Comparative Literature, German Philology and Slavic Studies (Russian) in Vienna and St. Petersburg, and did her PhD within the doctoral program “Habsburg Galicia” at the University of Vienna on “Das Potenzial der Peripherie. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) und Galizien” (Vienna University Press 2018). Current research interests: sensory studies, urban history, history of everyday life, socio-cultural history of East Central Europe and Russia in the 19th and 20th century.