Atmospheric Sensorium 


Abstract

This presentation will consider the role of atmospheres in orienting our everyday sensorial and affective experience, with a focus on thermal and olfactory media. I'll discuss interdisciplinary critiques of air conditioning as an infrastructure of thermal normativity that contributes to social and racial difference across multiple scales, as well as a range of cultural texts that defamiliarize, critique, and explore alternatives to air conditioning. After considering the insidious capacities of temperature as a force of social differentiation and thermal violence, I'll consider narratives that experiment with scent as a medium of sensorial worldmaking that can alter time, space, and patterns of human and more-than-human relation. 


Speaker's Short Intro.

Hsuan L. Hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020), and Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently working on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking. He serves (or has served) on the editorial and advisory boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, Genre: Forms of Dicourse and Culture; EurAmerica, Multimodality & Society, Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committees of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature and for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. 


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