Knowing by Sensing: How to Teach the History of Smell

For this inaugural module of the #AHRSyllabus collection, we invited the historical smells team called Odeuropa to introduce best practice techniques for teaching sensory history in the classroom. Odeuropa is a cross-disciplinary collective of historians, computer scientists, chemists, perfumers, curators and heritage policymakers who are working to develop novel methods for collecting data about historical smells from text and image collections in an effort to foster new forms of olfactory research, teaching and public exhibitions. In this module, they offer a set of seven short video presentations that explain how they approach teaching the history of smell and the ways in which it can enrich student learning about political, social and cultural history. The videos also provide teachers with easy and practical step-by-step guides for getting historical scents into the classroom and organizing smell walks that allow students, as Odeuropa puts it, “to sniff their way through history.”