America, the Beautiful: An Atlantic History of Perfume and Grooming Culture

What can we learn about a society through how it perfumes and grooms itself? More than you may think! Scholarship combining cultural with sensory history can unveil how past societies thought about their bodies, invented concepts such as „hygiene” and used notions of beauty, respectability and cleanliness – looking and smelling right – to define, categorize and create hierarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity and sub/countercultural identity. Products such as Murray & Lanham's Florida Water became arguments for American cultural equality to Europe, as well as central to Southern hoodoo and voodoo rituals.

This example points to the necessity of looking at American perfume and grooming culture through an Atlantic lens, as Europe remained a major influence, while the US became the site of various cultural intersections. For this course, be prepared to read, look, and smell... The course will be accompanied on moodle, passwords will be sent out after QIS-registration has ended.