Sensing the Materiality of the Early Modern Islamic World
22-23 May 2025, Utrecht
This conference addresses the role of material culture and architecture in shaping sensory and affective experience in the early modern Islamic world. By shaping experience on a somatic level, objects and architecture hold the potential to inform us about embodied social and cultural practices of the past in a different way than textual sources. By directly impacting the body’s sensory faculties, they facilitate or discourage certain emotional responses and forms of behavior. Sensations and emotions are often closely linked; thus, the careful calibration of the senses is an effective means of evoking affective reactions. Furthermore, the sensory and affective practices stimulated and mediated by material culture and architecture can collapse temporal and spatial distance by immersing subjects in the moment of experience. In other words, they can offer insights that complicate or contrast with scholars’ reconstructions of lived experience based solely on discursive practices.
How did material culture and architecture shape early modern Islamic sensescapes and the affective practices associated with them? How did the material and sensory properties of objects and architecture modulate these sensescapes? How did specific objects or built environments stimulate affective engagement and what kind? How did material and visual culture mediate perception in the early modern Islamic world? How did the sensory practices in separate political and cultural entities engage or distinguish themselves from one another? How did objects arouse distinct sensory experiences as they circulated and were recontextualized in the early modern period? How did people’s sensory experiences evolve as their urban environments changed in this era? These are some of the questions the conference seeks to address.
The full program of the conference can be downloaded here.
Date
Thursday 22 May 2025 – Friday 23 May 2025
From 9:00 – 17:30
Location
Day 1: Centraal Museum Utrecht, Agnietenstraat, 13512 XA Utrecht
Day 2: University Museum Utrecht, Lange Nieuwstraat 106, 3512 PN Utrecht
Registration
Entrance is free, but registration compulsory since seats are limited: sensis@uu.nl
We look forward to seeing you!
