Andrew Kettler
Andrew Kettler received his doctorate from the History Department at the University of South Carolina in May of 2017. Prior to entering the Graduate School at South Carolina, Andrew received his M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska-Omaha for his thesis, “The Deconstruction of European Odorphobia on the Sensory Border of the American Frontier.” He continues to research the use of olfactory language in the making of racial, class, and gendered metaphors. Andrew published some of these original findings in Senses and Society, the Journal of American Studies, in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, and in the edited collection Empire of the Senses. He has also published numerous book reviews, review essays, encyclopedia entries, has six articles currently under review, has current research essays published at the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Venti, Partial Answers, English Historical Review, and Patterns of Prejudice, and has circulated an additional research chapter within an edited collection on the Renaissance. During the 2016-2017 academic year, Andrew completed graduate research using funds provided from the Bilinski Educational Foundation. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he researched as a fellow at the University of Toronto, the Huntington Library, and the John Carter Brown Library. For the 2018-2019 academic year, Andrew also served as a short-term Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society. For the 2019-2020 academic year, Andrew served as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles as part of the 1619 anniversary series on the history of American slavery. In the summer of 2021, he also served as a fellow at Monticello. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World is published by Cambridge University Press and focuses on the importance of aromatic consciousness in the making of Atlantic era resistance to the olfactory discourses of state, religious, and slave masters. He is currently President of H-Net, co-editing the Routledge History of the Senses, and researching three new book projects on “Cattle and Capitalism,” “Anti-Accelerationism,” and “A Global History of Sulfur."
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Smith, Dr. Matt Childs, Dr. Woody Holton, Dr. John Grigg, Dr. Daniel Littlefield, Dr. David Shields, and Dr. Sharla Fett
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Smith, Dr. Matt Childs, Dr. Woody Holton, Dr. John Grigg, Dr. Daniel Littlefield, Dr. David Shields, and Dr. Sharla Fett
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Monograph Sections by Andrew Kettler
history, Andrew Kettler uses smell as a frame of analysis for
constructions and perceptions of race and the environment in the age of
Atlantic slavery. Kettler recounts how proponents of slavery defined
African bodies as noxious and pungent and therefore inferior and
deserving of enslavement. African slaves were deemed “excremental” by
their owners, and, as such, vastly inferior to their masters and trapped in a
pre-modern state of being in whichmodern hygiene and other trappings of
enlightenment remained beyond their reach. By branding African bodies as
odoriferous, slave owners equated them with animals or beasts of burden:
well-equipped for hard labor. Kettler vividly and effectively shows how the
sense of smell was used to aesthetically define specific populations as
lacking the necessary humanity to become full subjects, and in so doing
demonstrates that the roots of racism transgressed intellectual and political
arenas and included the realm of the senses.
Edited Book Sections by Andrew Kettler
CFP by Andrew Kettler
Articles and Chapters by Andrew Kettler
in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between
Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d’en
Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics
and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North
American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a
forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual
literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.
1800 worked consistently in libraries, herbariums, and visional gardens while
using a deodorized scientific methodology that found the vernacular and Native
American influences distasteful and increasingly useless, English colonial
botanists, both amateur and professional, analyzed plants in their frontier environment
with all of their sense organs, especially the nose.
embodied sensations deem ecological hazards. This may seem a simple
categorization regarding human choice to participate in environmental activism.
However, as energy conglomerates work to hide their malfeasance, modern
selves rarely experience environmental decline through the five senses. The
distances between the modern self and ecological hazards, both physical and
discursive, emerge because the superstructure develops defense mechanisms that
protect polluters. Encountering sulfur in the English environment, prior to the
Industrial Revolution, consistently meant that evil was moving within the
preternatural realm. The external sensing of evil through the sensory signatures
of sulfur was a form of sense work within the phenomenological space between
the supernatural and the natural. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the idea
that sensing sulfur signified evil or malevolence faded. Because coal and her
sulfuric sensory traits became vital to the establishment of the Industrial
Revolution, embodied changes were forced to occur, essentially through the
creation of a false sensory consciousness that defined sulfuric sensations as
positive markers of progress, profit, and purity. Upon the frontiers of the
commonwealth and the newly established United States, these sensations
persisted. The early frontiers of North America offer historical spaces where
individuals marched westward and educated their senses to discover profit.
Sulfuric connotations of evil were rarely considered, as frontiersmen educated
their senses beneath a superstructure that defined associations with sulfur as
preternaturally safe. Sensory skills were negotiated and educated to catch coal
and sulfur through greater and more refined tactile, nasal, flavorful, visual, and
aural skills. These sensory pedagogies inhabited somatic work farther west into
British Columbia, known for explosive environmental conditions due to large
coal supplies, indigenous populations, sacred alimentary goods, and amazing
natural beauty. How citizens decide to become activated to environmental
concern, as within modern Vancouver and her sulfur mounds, arises through
whether the socially constructed senses ever perceive pollution as corruptive.