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 lectures in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Loyola International College of Concordia University, Montreal. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from McGill University. Constance Classen holds a Ph. D. in Religious Studies from McGill University and has undertaken research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and 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. Her current writing has focused on urban history and the senses.
Classen is the author of numerous essays and books on the cultural life of the senses, including 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), and Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994, co-authored with David Howes and Anthony Synnott). She is also the editor of The Book of Touch, a collection of essays on the history, sociology and anthropology of touch published in 2005 by Berg of Oxford. Natïve American cultures constitute another important area of research for Classsen, who has undertaken field work in the Andean region of South America. This research led to various publications including Inca Cosmology and the Human Body (University of Utah Press 1993).
