Mark M. Smith: Fingertipping: Touching Biographies

Mark Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where he is the Director of Research at the Institute for Southern Studies. His forthcoming book, A Sensory History Manifesto, encourages historians of sense to help the field evolve while preserving robust dialectical interpretation. He is also the General Editor of Cambridge Studies on the American South. Recently, Smith has written on the alienation of the senses during the time of Covid-19. His interest in how the senses mediate our understanding of reality continues to foster collaboration and conversation within an interdisciplinary scholarly community.

Gordon Hughes: The Coxcomb and The Skeptical Critic; Or, Must You Mean What You Say When We See?

Gordon Hughes is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University, where he is the Co-Director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program. His recent book, Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism, treats one artist’s work as a response to emerging scientific theories of sight. An engagement with continental theory informs Hughes’ writing and thinking about art, although it is always in the service of the primary act of viewing. Originally trained as a visual artist, a concern with close looking orients his approach to teaching, which takes uncovering and describing the vast complexities of artistic form-and the ways in which these complexities intersect with history and theory-as the central problem of art historical investigation.

Isaac A. Weiner: Sound – and Unsound – Religion

Isaac Weiner is Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. His scholarship in American religious studies focuses on pluralism, law, and sensory culture. His first book, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism, analyzes disputes about public religious sound to address the politics of religious pluralism in the US. He also co-directs the American Religious Sounds Project, which documents and interprets the diversity of American religious life by attending to its various sonic cultures.

Anita Mannur: Race, Taste, Place

Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio. Her work on diaspora studies, food studies, and gender studies treats culinary culture and eating as modes through which social worlds are formed, mediated and sustained. Her forthcoming book project, Intimate Eating Publics, examines a constellation of texts and cultural objects – ranging from art installations to romance novels to “The Great British Bakeoff” – to show how non-normative intimacies can be brokered through food in the realm of the public.

Clare Batty: Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone: Lessons from COVID-19

Clare Batty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Her work on philosophy of mind centers around the study of perceptual experience, illusion, and (non-)veridicality, with an especial focus on studying olfaction to fill the gap in philosophy on the chemical senses. She has also written on the philosophical history of the senses and the conditions of object perception. Her interest in oft-neglected modalities furthers the philosophical understanding of perception by asking new questions and challenging old assumptions.