David Howes
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, and the Director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (CONSERT). He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (1979), a Masters of Literature (Social Anthropology) from the University of Oxford (1981) and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Montreal (1992), as well as a Bachelor of Civil Law and Bachelor of Common Law degree from McGill University (both 1985).
Howes has conducted field research on the cultural life of the senses in the Middle Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States. He is presently researching the sensory life of things in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and also involved in a project investigating recent trends in multisensory marketing. Other research interests include cross-cultural jurisprudence, constitutional studies, indigenous psychologies, and aesthetics.
Howes is the editor of The Varieties of Sensory Experience (UTP, 1991), Cross-Cultural Consumption (Routledge, 1996), Empire of the Senses (Berg, 2004), and Cross-Cultural Jurisprudence (CJLS, 2005), the co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994), and, the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Michigan, 2003). His latest book is called The Sixth Sense Reader (Berg, 2009)
For more information on the author’s research activities and publications please see www.david-howes.com and the CONSERT homepage at http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses.
Constance Classen
Constance Classen holds a Ph.D. from McGill University and is the author of numerous essays and books on the cultural life of the senses. These include: The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (Routledge, 1998), Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (Routledge, 1993), Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994, co-authored with David Howes and Anthony Synnott), and The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch,(University of Illinois Press, 2012). She is also the General Editor of the Berg Cultural History of the Senses series, which will consist of six volumes ranging from Antiquity to the Modern Age. She has undertaken research as a postdoctoral fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Recently she has been a visiting fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture where she investigated the social and sensory history of architectural design and museum display.
