It is with great excitement that we announce the start of a new seminar series on ‘Affective Artefacts’, which is going to discuss the agentive and affective qualities of matter, thus, the capacity of materials and things to generate, maintain, and challenge emotional atmospheres. This semester, Kat Hill (Birkbeck), Hannah Newton (Reading), Tim Ingold (Aberdeen), Oliver Harris (Leicester), Katherine Bond (Basel), and Monique Scheer (Tübingen) will present their most recent research (see attached programme). Bringing together researchers of different disciplinary backgrounds such as anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, curators, historians and sociologists, the seminar provides a
Fig. 1: Students experimenting with sixteenth-century recipes. ©Stefan Hanß Dr Stefan Hanß writes about the meanings of scent on early modern gloves and hands, along with his experiments into remaking early modern perfumes. In the meantime, further such remaking experiments took place at the University of Manchester where third-year students squeeze citrus fruits, grind chalk, and grate a yellowish gum taken from the mastic tree in Greece (Fig. 1). Studying the material and olfactory world of Reformation Germany can be a real hands-on experience! Read more here.
