This seminar explores how biographers might utilise the new research in the senses which first understands the visual trace as a particular way of knowing the subject. Since all of the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) are essential to human experience it is little wonder that those who have written in this field from Anthropology and History argue that the unthinking dominance of the visual in historical and cultural accounts limits our imagination and ignores the equally crucial role that other senses play in our experience and understanding of the world. In turn some scholars are reconsidering the nature of social experience and how an individual’s identity might be constituted beyond language. At the very least this scholarship helps us to re-imagine the subject as archivally embodied, shifting across space and time.  I discuss some of the conceptual and methodological issues arising from these new approaches and ask how and why they matter to the biographical enterprise.

Paula Hamilton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Technology in Sydney. Her specialist areas of research include cultural history and memory studies, especially individual and public memory; oral history and biography. She is also the Director of the Australian Centre for Public History and has worked in a range of projects with museums, heritage agencies and community organisations. Her most recent publications are (co-edited with Linda Shopes) Oral History and Public Memories, Temple University Press, 2008 and (with Paul Ashton) the forthcoming History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past, to be published by Halstead press in 2010.