Lucy McGourty MA

PhD candidate

E-mail: l.h.g.mcgourty@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Area(s) of interest: Early Modern History, History of Books, Music & Theatre History, Sensory History

Cohort/Start PhD: 2023-2024

Smellbound: The Poetics of Olfaction in Early Modern Poetry

Title overarching project: (POEM) Poetics of Olfaction in Early Modernity

Leiden University

Supervisors: Prof.dr. I.B. Leemans and Dr. J.F van Dijkhuizen

Poets and playwrights of the early modern period were fascinated by smell. My PhD project is part of the NWO-funded project ‘POEM’, which investigates the role of smell in early modern Dutch and English plays and poetry. I will examine how the language of olfaction was put to literary use by early modern Dutch and English poets. For this I will employ a mixture of distant and close reading methods. My project aims to uncover the role of olfaction and the cultural meanings attributed to it in early modern Dutch and English poetry.