The Senses and Memory

How are the senses and memory linked? What do sensory approaches to research reveal about the functions of memory? This edited volume encompasses various interdisciplinary projects that showcase the value of viewing the world through all of the senses and the ways that memory is multisensorial. From smell’s “Proust effect” to music’s ability to improve memory and mood, we remember and memorize the world through sensory input. This book expands research on multimodal work, the senses and materiality, the senses and methodology, sensing memories of the past, and technology’s impact on sensory lives. The chapters included cover all the senses, as well as the cross-modal experience of synesthesia. Each chapter further covers concepts related to memory studies, ranging from nostalgia, traumatic memories, and memorials to remembering the past (history), archives, and questions of identity. This edited volume is divided into five sections, each containing two to three chapters. The five sections, “Sensing Place and Space,” “Art as a Medium of Memory,” “In the Mind of Synesthesia,” “Making Sense of Materiality,” and “Technology and the Sensorium,” describe different groupings of interest. From questions of spatiality to digital life, each section invites the reader to explore new developments in the fields of memory studies and sensory studies and new insights on established topics. In these intimate, critical, and penetrating chapters, the authors of this book share new visions of what it means to write at the crossroads of the senses and memory and present new methodologies, frameworks, and pedagogies for examining this interconnection. A resource for both research and teaching, this volume represents a valuable guide for scholars working in sensory studies and memory studies. The hope is that "The Senses and Memory " will inspire future research and thinking in these evolving and expanding fields of study.

List of Figures
Foreword
Hsuan L. Hsu
University of California, Davis, United States
Introduction: Memory as Sensory Engagement
Chanelle Dupuis
Brown University, United States
Rachel S. Herz
Brown University, United States

Sensing Place and Space
1. Amateur Ornithologies, Memories of Rural Sensations?
Théophile Robert-Rimsky
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
2. Spatializing Sensory Memory Through Sketching and Making
Jieling Xiao
Birmingham City University, UK
PerMagnus Lindborg
City University of Hong Kong, China
3. The Kitchen: A Space of Sri Lankan Transoceanic Memory in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1994)
Shyama Ramsamy Goomany
Open University of Mauritius, Mauritius

Art as a Medium of Memory
4. Retuning Attention: Smells in Multimodal Exhibitions and Exhibition-Related Practices of Attention Care
Renata Pękowska
Technological University Dublin, Ireland
5. Sculpting Futurist Senses: F. T. Marinetti’s Renewal of Tactilism and the Evolution of Futurist Ceramics (1925-1939)
Helen Shaw
Independent scholar
6. Photography and Painting as Media of Memory
Andrew Milne
The University of Western Australia, Australia

In the Mind of Synesthesia
7. Auditory-Olfactory Synesthesia, Metaphor, and Memory
Annick Le Guérer
LIMSIC, Université de Bourgogne, France
8. Synesthetic Narratology: Exploring Multi-Sensory Storytelling in Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things
Roksana Zgierska
University of Gdańsk, Poland

Making Sense of Materiality
9. The Liveness of Things: Assembling Memorials in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Fernanda Alves
Center for Legal, Economic, International and Environmental Studies
(CEJEIA), Lusíada University of Porto, Portugal
10. “I Hate Being Cold” – A Multisensory Door to the Territory of Repressed Traumatic Memories
Erzsébet Fanni Tóth
Sigmund Freud University, Austria
11. Sensorial Justice: Legal Atrocity Archives and Relational Memory in Fractured Societies
Benjamin Thorne
University of Reading, England

Technology and the Sensorium
12. Remembrance of the Bicameral Mind: Sensory Worlds at the Interface
Andrew Kettler
University of South Carolina-Palmetto College, United States
13. Meta-Mediation: Exploring Disenchanting Encounters and Rewilding in the Postdigital
Shari Bloom
University of Southeastern Norway (USN), Norway
14. Prison Break? (Re)Constructing the Spatial Memory of Bijlmerbajes Through the Senses
Linda Kopitz
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Contributors
Index

Chanelle Dupuis is a PhD student at Brown University in the French and Francophone Studies department. She holds a Master’s degree from Brown University in French and Francophone Studies and a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Spanish from Florida State University. Her research is focused on sensory studies and, more particularly, smell studies. She works on the representation of odors in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone novels. Her current dissertation project analyzes the role of smells in dystopias in relation to environmental change, nonhuman lives, technologies of smell, and descriptions of atmospheres. Her areas of interest include memory studies, the environmental humanities, Québécois literature, perfume culture, anosmia, linguistics, and graphic narrative studies. She recently published an article titled “Smell and Resistance: Writing to Denounce in Charlotte Delbo’s Memoir ‘Auschwitz and After’” in Volume 1, Issue 1 of the journal ‘Alabastron’. An active member of the sensory studies community, she runs a website called Smell Studies (www.smellstudies.com), which hosts a smell studies blog and an international working group composed of young scholars from a variety of disciplines.

affect, artificial intelligence, arts-based research, assemblage, attention, auditory-olfactory, bicameralism, birds, care, ceramics, collaborative inquiry, consciousness, diasporic, drawing, environmental history, ethnography, exhibition, Fascism, food, France, Futurism, hauntings, heritage, historical adversity, intertextuality, international criminal law and justice, kitchen, legal atrocity archives, medium specificity, memory, memorialization, metaphor, meta-mediation, multimodal storytelling, multisensory memory production, multispecies studies, Murambi, philosophy of memory, philosophy of time, postdigital, postphenomenology, prison, reader-response, reflective practice, rewilding, Rwanda, sensation, sensory engagement, sensory memory, sketching, smell, smells, social media, sounds, space, spatial memories, synesthesia, synesthetic narratology, Tactilism, totalitarianism, touch, transoceanic, trauma narratives, urban atmosphere