Scents of China
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- RB01
About this event
In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period.
Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the 'smellscapes' of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.
About the speaker
Xuelei Huang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from the University of Heidelberg and held research positions at Academia Sinica, the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies, and the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna (IFK).
Her research focuses on sensory history and media culture in modern China, and her publications include Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell (2023), Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (2014), Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (co-edited with Shengqing Wu, 2022), and journal articles. She is the recipient of the Ruprecht Karls Prize for best dissertation and an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship, among others.
Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, SOAS Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Registration
This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required.
Please note that this seminar is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.
Organiser
Contact
- Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
