NFC Director Prof. Robert Davidson wins SSHRC Insight Award for five-year project Spain’s Fragrant Modernity
Spain’s Fragrant Modernity addresses the following questions: How have particular smells marked Spanish modernity? How can an increased awareness of them--along with odours and stenches connected to Orientalization suffered and perpetrated by Spain--contribute to a new way of knowing the country? What do the smells and their multiple manifestations in culture tell us exactly? And how? This project posits that an in-depth study of olfactory culture in Spain will reveal that the country's unique experience produced distinctive approaches to sensory modernity tied to access to foreign markets and broader olfactory communities. That "Spain's Fragrant Modernity" will contribute directly to both anew sensory approach to archival research and the destabilization of sensorial hierarchies in the humanities during an increasingly virtual, AI-reliant age, makes it all the more timely and necessary.
For more details on the 2024-2025 SSHRC Insight winners, please follow this link.
Former NFC Fellow, Carrie Reese, develops popular U of T class "Horror Film"
Appearing in U of T News, former NFC Doctoral Fellow (2018-2019) Carrie Reese, has developed a fascinating new course for the Faculty of Arts & Science's Cinema Studies Institute.
The course examines horror films through a critical thinking lens, exploring key elements such as gender and genre as well as notions of space, the home and ownership. That extends to discussing ways that horror connects to emotion and experience, and how emotions like fear and dread can be visualized.
You can read more about the development of the course and her horror recommendations here.
New Publication from NFC Fellow Rhiannon Vogl
Congratulations to NFC Doctoral Fellow, Rhiannon Vogl, who has recently published an article in the recent Spring 2023 issue of RACAR, the Journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada.
Her article is titled 'Wave/Lengths in Lucy Lippard’s I See / You Mean'. It explores Lucy Lippard’s only published novel, I See / You Mean. The novel began as a wry conceptual experiment and became a sensual and provocative self-exploration. It is intimately tied to Lippard’s experiences within the contemporary art world, the rising feminist movement, and her desire to explore her relationship to both. This article explores the development of collage-as-methodology in Lippard’s writing, suggests the “sensuous grid” as a new framework for contextualizing Lippard’s approach to her practice, and resituates I See / You Mean as a nodal point in Lippard’s career, emphasizing the importance of fiction writing in the critic’s work.
To read her article, follow this link.
