https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8975-8031
For this inaugural module of the #AHRSyllabus collection, we invited the historical smells team called Odeuropa to introduce best practice techniques for teaching sensory history in the classroom. Odeuropa is a cross-disciplinary collective of historians, computer scientists, chemists, perfumers, curators and heritage policymakers who are working to develop novel methods for collecting data about historical smells from text and image collections in an effort to foster new forms of olfactory research, teaching and public exhibitions. In this module, they offer a set of seven short video presentations that explain how they approach teaching the history of smell and the ways in which it can enrich student learning about political, social and cultural history. The videos also provide teachers with easy and practical step-by-step guides for getting historical scents into the classroom and organizing smell walks that allow students, as Odeuropa puts it, “to sniff their way through history.”
Navigating the “Knowing by Sensing” Module
Welcome to “Knowing by Sensing.” This #AHRSyllabus module is designed to introduce you to how to teach about smells with smells.
“Knowing by Sensing” contains a set of seven short videos designed by members of the Odeuropa project team based on our own teaching in classrooms and museums:
Inger Leemans, a cultural historian and the Odeuropa project lead, introduces the module by highlighting how the history of smell can offer students transformative ways of understanding the past.
Historian William Tullett, whose research and teaching focuses on sensory history, provides a mini-lecture on the history and historiography of smell. His lecture covers diverse topics ranging from animals and smell to incense and from cleanliness to contemporary stop and search policies.
Caro Verbeek and Sofia Ehrich, art historians who are experts in embodied learning and olfactory museology, take smell history into your classroom with some “nose-on” video instructions on how to teach with smell. They will dive into the practicalities, including where to get scents and how to distribute them, and provide several simple ways you can encourage students to use an “olfactory gaze” in the classroom in order to gain historical knowledge by smelling.
Kate McLean, Cecilia Bembibre and Victoria-Anne Michel, all members of the interdisciplinary Odeuropa team, take you on a historical “smellwalk” and explain how you can design your own. In learning by doing, they demonstrate the ways in which you can use the technique of smellwalks in your teaching to enable students to explore new histories of their own community through smelling.
At the end of the module you will also find suggestions for further reading and explorations, both for teachers and for students.
How you navigate the components of the module is up to you: you can either follow the scent trail that we have laid out for you in the videos, or you can take another route. But wherever you start, we would greatly appreciate it if you would fill in a short survey (see the QR code at the end of this piece) for us, so we can expand our knowledge about your interests and expectations, as well as hear suggestions for future improvements. Follow your nose and take your students on a nosedive into a “whiffstory”!
Sensory history is a fast-expanding field, attracting more and more researchers and teachers interested in the social life of the senses. Olfactory history—researching and teaching about smell and the past—is somewhat of a newcomer, but it offers many opportunities to innovate your classroom in ways that encourage students to understand more familiar and less studied historical issues in novel ways. The module is intentionally “nose-on” and offers a space where teachers and students learn by doing. This means that instead of providing written instructions on how to teach with smell, we will invite participants to walk with us, step by step, through different educational technologies around smell.
Students can literally sniff their way through history. This module is designed to help you to take the first steps to turn your classroom into a laboratory by making historical smells and inviting students to learn with their noses.
Jars of ingredients used to create embalming powder in the classroom.
Why Teach with Smell
Heritage Scents in the Classroom, Inger Leemans
Inger Leemans, professor of cultural history and the Odeuropa project lead, presents an overview of the “Knowing by Sensing” module for the #AHRSyllabus collection and explains why bringing smells into the classroom when teaching about the past can be a transformative experience for students. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
Our classrooms tend to be quite sensory poor. We mostly engage our students by making them read, listen, discuss, and look at PowerPoints. The recent pandemic and lockdowns aggravated this “visual bias.” Learning, however, is something that is done with the whole body. Your students probably play historical games, listen to podcasts, or possess artistic skills. Teaching with smell provides an opportunity to tap into this creative knowledge, providing students with new, embodied learning techniques. This can make the past more tangible for students. Experimenting with smell in the classroom will show that smelling makes students talkative. Students immediately start to communicate and share their experiences and insights. Smells are quite inclusive: they can help bridge gaps between different cultures in the international classroom. Since the history of smell is less canonized, it provides opportunities to address difficult, “weaponized,” and contested topics, like the history of colonialism, from new angles.
Let me give you one example. The fragrant powder that was used for the embalming of William the Silent, Prince of Orange and the main leader of the Dutch Revolt. When William was assassinated in 1584, his body was opened for postmortem examination and preservation. After the heart and intestines were removed, this powder was used to cleanse and preserve the body from the insideso that his relatives could travel from different parts of Europe to the Netherlands for his burial, which was nearly a month after his death.
The recipe, which has been described by the doctor who did the autopsy, consists of twenty-five different ingredients: herbs, spices, and resins. Many of them are nowadays easy to find. They probably have a place in your own kitchen cabinet: dried mint, rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, marjoram, cumin, nutmeg, and cloves. The herbs would have been quite easy to obtain in 1584 as well, but spices such as nutmeg and cloves would have been more expensive. When the students start to grind these fragrances, and mix lavender in as well, they can learn about their olfactory qualities while also searching for additional information in old medical and botanical handbooks. They will then find out that not only do these odorants produce a strong, fragrant smell that could overcome the cadaverine stench of the decaying body—according to the humoral theory of disease, these fragrances were also considered to be warm and dry. Therefore, they were used to drive out the moisture and cold.
Aloe was probably also used to drain the body of its fluids. If you have your students browse the New Testament, they will find out that aloe and myrrh were used for the embalming of Christ. This is not the aloe we find in so many beauty products now, but probably agarwood or styrax. The fact that luxury resins, such as myrrh, benzoin, and styrax, were also used for William of Orange provides an opportunity to discuss with your students the symbolic reasons for embalming. By being embalmed with ingredients and techniques that had been used for ancient kings and pharaohs, the Dutch official was elevated to the highest ranks. Creating a pleasant smell (close to the smell of holiness) also helped to exalt the memory of the deceased and facilitate their entry into paradise.
Materials for the William of Orange Embalming Powder
Herbs and Spices*
Cloves
Cumin
Marjoram
Mint
Oregano
Rosemary
Thyme
Sage
Other Materials
Mortar and pestle
Gloves
Resin (available at craft stores)
*All herbs and spices specified are dried
The full recipe, which takes 30–45 minutes to prepare, can be found in the supplementary data for this article on AHR online
By having your students decipher and recreate this old recipe, you can teach about:
funerary rituals, exploring how societies dealt with the dead in the past;
olfactory approaches to the history of medicine and histories of colonialism, including the connections between smells and the history of colonial forced labor employed to cultivate spices.
On the Scent
A Brief Introduction to the History of Smells, William Tullett
Smell historian William Tullett presents an introductory lecture on the history of smell. Teachers can either use the video to get acquainted with the topic, or to show it to their students. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
In this introductory lecture (video 2), smell historian William Tullett offers a short history of smell informed by his own research and teaching. You can use Will’s lecture with your students, or a PowerPoint presentation (available in the supplementary data for this article on AHR online) if you prefer to give your own lecture. Among the issues William discusses are:
the myth that animals have a better sense of smell than humans;
what he calls the grand deodorization narrative, asking whether we have become less odorous over time or if modernity has produced as many smells as it erased;
how the history of disease and hygiene are fundamentally shaped by smells; and the methods through which historians are recovering past meanings associated with smells.
How to Teach with and about Smells
Caro Verbeek and Sofia Collette Ehrich
Through several short videos, art historians and olfactory museologists, Caro Verbeek and Sofia Collette Ehrich, take smell history into your classroom with nose-on video instructions that present the basic building blocks for how to teach with smells. They dive into the practicalities, including where to acquire scents and best practices for distributing them to your students, and provide several simple ways you can help students develop their ‘olfactory gaze’ to gain historical knowledge by smelling.
Taste and Smell Techniques, Caro Verbeek
Caro Verbeek explores how we smell through several smell and taste experiments that ask students to develop and refine their olfactory gaze. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
In video 3, Caro Verbeek, who has been engaged in teaching about smell and multisensory smell methods for twenty years, discusses some of the practicalities of using smell in the classroom by employing several easy to replicate experiments. She helps viewers understand
basic sniffing techniques including the rhythms through which we smell and the ways in which each nostril can provide different sensory perspectives; and
trigeminal perceptions that involve the mouth and the nose to reveal the sensory properties of objects such as the coolness of a peppermint or the warmth of pepper.
Caro also offers exercises based on these techniques to help cultivate the olfactory gaze in students, including one that examines the very different presence of frankincense in two early modern European religious paintings.
Taste and Smell Experiments, Caro Verbeek
Caro Verbeek demonstrates how to set up a jelly bean experiment that helps students discern between taste and smell and their interconnections in the making of smell history. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
In video 4, Caro Verbeek reveals the interconnections between smell and taste by having students perform an experiment with jelly beans. They inhale, pinch their nose and place the jellybean in their mouth, and then release their nose to perceive how the taste of the candy changes once they can smell. When students release their nose an airflow starts moving internally towards the back of our noses and they actually smell what they have put in their mouths. As Caro demonstrates, we have two noses, or at least three entrances to nostrils and the mouth, when we smell fully using our noses.
Taste and Smell Lecture Snapshot, Caro Verbeek
Caro Verbeek deploys a second jellybean experiment to discuss how smelling can serve as an innovative and invaluable research tool to recover new forms of historical memory. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
In video 5, Caro Verbeek talks about the sniffing exercises that are part of her own historical practice around smells and material culture, and the importance of training the nose to use smell rather than just touch to fully understand the history of an object. She models a second jellybean experiment that can help students better understand the connections between smell and temperature and their impact on the making of historical memory.
Bringing Smells into the Classroom, Sofia Collette Ehrich
Sofia Collette Ehrich introduces several practical means to easily introduce smell and smell history into the classroom. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
Sofia Collette Ehrich, olfactory researcher, provides practical instructions on how to bring scents directly into the classroom (video 6), including the use of easily accessible blotters and sprays which are commonly used in the perfume industry. These methods can give students both communal and more initiate opportunities to encounter smells and make historical meaning of them.
Go Smellwalk!
Go Smellwalk, Kate McLean, Cecilia Bembibre, and Victoria-Anne Michel
In Go Smellwalk! Kate McLean, Cecilia Bembibre, and Victoria-Anne Michel help teachers organize smellwalks for their students as a tool to research historical smellscapes in their own communities. The video can be accessed on AHR online.
In video 7, Odeuropa team members Kate McLean, Cecilia Bembibre, and Victoria-Anne Michel go on a smellwalk through London. Kate explains the basics of smellwalking techniques, where she has participants use a SenseLog to document their descriptions of the scents they encounter. You can use a SenseLog (available in the supplementary data for this article on AHR online) on the smellwalks you and your students develop in your own communities.
For a deeper dive into the pedagogy of smellwalks, you can listen to “Smellwalking and the Smellscape” here. The audio is available on AHR online.
Further Reading
To read more about the history of smell, smell walking, and teaching with the nose, the Odeuropa team offers these suggestions:
The World of Smell
Matthew Cobb, Smell: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Harold McGee, Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells (Penguin Press, 2020).
Annick Le Guérer, Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell (Chatto and Windus, 1993).
Ann-Sophie Barwich, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Smell History
Mark Smith, editor, Smell and History: A Reader (West Virginia University Press, 2019).
Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (University of Illinois Press, 2014).
William Tullett, Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2023), https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/smell-and-the-past-noses-archives-narratives/.
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1986).
David Howes, Constance Classen, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994).
Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sensibility in Early Modern England (John Hopkin’s University Press, 2011).
William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Sensory Education and Exploration
Anna Harris, A Sensory Education (Routledge, 2020); open-access version available, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003084341/sensory-education-anna-harris.
Victoria Henshaw, Kate McLean, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins, and Gary Warnaby, editors, Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques, and Challenges (Routledge, 2018)
Conversation on “Enhancing Virtual Intimacy and Sensory Engagement in Art and Education,” led by Caro Verbeek (2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR9V2ikumZM.
Caro Verbeek, “Knowing by Sensing: a Course on Smelling, Tasting and Hearing for Academics,” Futurist Scents (blog), November 2, 2020, https://futuristscents.com/2020/11/02/knowing-by-sensing-a-course-on-smelling-tasting-and-hearing-for-academics/.
Smell Walking and Mapping
Kate McLean’s website, Sensory Maps, includes a range of smell maps and details about smell walking, including a list of her publications: https://sensorymaps.com/.
Kate McLean and Chris Perkins, “Smell Walking and Mapping,” in Mundane Methods: Innovative Ways to Research the Everyday, edited by S. M. Hall and H. Holmes (Manchester University Press, 2020), 156–73; open-access postprint proof available, https://research.manchester.ac.uk/files/176317151/2020_PerkinsMcLeanSmellwalking_2020.pdf.
Smell and Museums
Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, editors, Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Constance Classen, The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Mathilde Castel, editor, Les dispositifs olfactifs au musée (Nez recherche, 2019).
Caro Verbeek, “Presenting Volatile Heritage: Two Case Studies on Olfactory Reconstructions in the Museum,” Future Anterior 13, no. 2 (2017): 33–42.
The AHR History Lab has published four interventions by the Odeuropa team on the history of smell:
“Smell, History and Heritage,” a conversation between leading scholars of smell history that introduces the new histories of smell and explores some of the ways in which the history of smell can enrich and alter our understand of the past, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac147;
“Whiffstory: Using Multidisciplinary Methods to Represent the Olfactory Past,” a deep dive into interdisciplinary methods to recover the olfactory past including such forms of scent reconstruction as analyzing chemical compounds of historical smells, the use of historical recipe books and multisensory story telling in museums through smellscapes, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac159;
“Making Whiffstory,” an account of Odeuropa’s re-creation of the scent of the gloves worn in a portrait by a seventeenth century Dutch patrician woman, including the first peer-reviewed scratch-and-sniff card to appear in the American Historical Review that allows readers to directly encounter the smell they recreated, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac150;
“More Than the Name of the Rose,” a how-to guide on using AI methods to enable computers to read, see, and organize historical smells in digital heritage collections, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad141.
Author Biographies
Inger Leemans is professor of cultural history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is PI of both the Odeuropa project and the NL-Lab, a research group on Dutch culture and identity at the Humanities Cluster within the KNAW. Her research focuses on early modern cultural history, the history of emotions and the senses, cultural economy, and digital humanities, and she has published about the history of pornography, the (radical) Enlightenment, stock markets, and financial crises.
William Tullett is lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York. He is the author of Smell in Eighteenth-Century England (2019) and Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (2023). As part of the Odeuropa project, he is developing an online Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage. He is currently developing several new projects, including research on the history of animals and smell.
Caro Verbeek is an art historian, curator and maker specialized in the senses of smell and touch and the intersensory phenomenon synaesthesia. She wrote her PhD on olfactory museology and the role of smell in the avant-garde. She is known for her several Tedx-talks on the topic and is the founder of several courses on analytical sensing. She is also a curator of the largest collection of Mondrian’s art at Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Sofia Collette Ehrich is an art historian, academic researcher, podcast host, and curator of multisensory experiences. Within the Odeuropa project, she led the production of five olfactory events and researched, documented and outlined best practices and challenges of using olfactory storytelling in GLAMs.
Kate McLean is the program director for Graphic Design at the University of Kent. She is co-editor of Designing with Smell: Practices, Techniques and Challenges (2019) and a practicing designer who leads smellwalks and designs smellmaps to aid communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed information with relation to place. Her smellmaps are held in international museum collections worldwide. Her current research projects seek to communicate links between smell perceptions and air quality, and to explore the narrative qualities of smell experience as a linear and sequential process.
Cecilia Bembibre is a lecturer in sustainable heritage at University College London. She is a heritage and communications professional with a focus on sensory/intangible heritage and participatory research. In the Odeuropa project, she leads the work exploring how presenting smells in museums impacts visitors and collections, and she develops methodologies for digitizing smells.
Victoria-Anne Michel is a PhD candidate within the Odeuropa project. Her research focuses on the interconnections between smells, users, spaces, and representations in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and heritage sites. Using textual analysis and smellwalks, she aims to retrace and contextualize the olfactory narratives mentioned by visitors and GLAMs professionals, eventually exploring how smells participate in our making sense of place.
