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…
