Beloveds, I am so happy to announce that I will be curating the newly relaunched Scent & Society series for the Institute of Art and Olfaction! I’m excited to go more in-depth about subjects adjacent to my smelly work here, but that don’t quite fit into Death/Scent’s vibe. Don’t worry though, D/S will still be going forward as usual. To start things off, I will be covering some of the basics about studying scent throughout time and in other cultures, details below.
Category: Academic
[September Online Class] Smells like Xenophobia: An Olfactive History of Otherness
I’m happy to announce that there will be an encore of my class, Smells like Xenophobia: An Olfactive History of Otherness, next week as part of the Institute of Art and Olfaction’s Scent Week programming and in conjunction with their Scent & Society series. If you missed this class last month, this is your…
[June Online Class] The Putrid and the Divine: The Magical Scents of Christian Saints
I am so excited to announce that I will be teaching another online class for the Institute of Art and Olfaction. This class is a fun dive into Christian olfactive ontology (I swear, it is cooler then it sounds, see below). The course will be held June 23rd, 9:00am-10:30am PST. My last two classes with…
The Redolent Plague Doctor?
We’ve all seen him. A dark figure, robed in black, carrying his long examining stick like a scythe. A pale beak glimpsing out from beyond his broad-brimmed hat. A carrion crow turned man. Such nightmare fuel could only spring forth from the fever dreams of a Dark Age mind, right? His beak stuffed with aromatic…
The Scented History of the Plague: A Primer
Hello my beloveds, over the next few posts we will be discussing the history of the plague, miasma, and their impact on olfactive culture. This turned into a gigantic undertaking so instead of dropping a 10,000-word brick in your inboxes I’ll be breaking up our tale over several posts. Before we get into the super…
Books I’m Excited to Read This Year
A new year is upon us and with it, a fresh start to crush my Goodreads Reading Challenge, or at least that is how I would have approached it in past years. I’m an intensely competitive person, and I would read 60-90 books a year mostly just to prove I could. I always had a…
The Putrid and the Divine Book Club
A few years back, after receiving several requests for more information on topics covered in the blog, I made a lengthy list of over 50 books to indulge our olfactive bookworms. In retrospect, that list was a bit daunting. At first, I was planning to just do an updated tighter edit of that list but…
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Started My PhD
So I rarely go off on tangents here, but given the number of questions I’ve received about my PhD since starting the blog, I thought it might be a good idea to have a little sideline chat. Don’t worry, more smelly death stuff to come shortly, but here are a few words of advice from someone at…
The Death/Scent Reading List
Over the last year I have had several requests for more information and deeper reads on subjects brought up on the blog. So after banging around my shelves a bit, here is the Death/Scent reading list. Some of them are staples of both olfactive and death literature, others are weird and wonderful deep cuts. This…
Turning the Bones Part II: Endangered Customs
This is Part II of our two-part look at Famadihana. Read Part I here While forces have been at work for some time trying to kill the lively and joyous practice of Famadihana, they have done little to dampen the practice in the highlands; what may prove the death nail, however, is the pneumonic plague.
