Space available in Social Sciences course "Perceiving the World"
Did you know that in the seventeenth century, it was a good thing to smell like the anal glands of a deer?
This history course will tell you why. Being taught this spring by Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Sciences Dr. Carolyn Purnell, the course fulfills the Social Sciences general education requirement.
Course: Perceiving the World
Course number: LCHS 285-001
Time offered: MW 11:25-12:40
Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling–we’re taught at an early age that these five senses are our means of experiencing the world around us. Despite the seemingly stable nature of our senses, this course will show that the way different cultures have organized and used the senses has varied widely. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on sociology, history, anthropology, media studies, and psychology, this course will trace shifts in perception and their accompanying social effects between the eighteenth century and today. Through a series of diverse topics, such as color, railroads, perfume, and drugs, this course will investigate the relationship between the physical and the social, the role of daily experience in our considerations of history, and the political implications of the body.
More about Dr. Purnell:
Carolyn Purnell is a historian. She is also a freelance writer and photographer, interior design aficionada, and lover of all things quirky. Her work appears regularly on ApartmentTherapy.com and in several Chicago-area publications, and her photographs have appeared in Good Housekeeping. She has also worked at a library, an academic journal, a radio station, and a tractor dealership.
A country girl by birth but a city girl by heart, Carolyn grew up in Texas then moved to southern California for college, where she studied under David Foster Wallace and increasingly learned the rigors and pleasures of the written word. Her education introduced her to James Joyce, Gerhard Richter, and the Marquis de Sade, and it was perhaps the subconscious influence of the latter that convinced her to spend the next seven years of her life as a graduate student.
At the University of Chicago, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D., Carolyn turned her attention to history, a field that she likes to describe as “fiction with facts.” Her academic specialties are France, sexuality, the eighteenth century, the history of science and medicine, and the history of the senses, but after spending several years in France for research, it might be more accurate to say that her specialties are pastries, cheese, and wine.
Carolyn lives in Chicago with her partner Ed, her dog Minna, her chinchilla Chunky, and a rotating cast of dogs that she fosters for a local rescue.
