Olfactory Atmospheres of Evil in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Performance

Julia will present a talk on “Olfactory Atmospheres of Evil in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Performance” at the conference “Performing Evil: The Mediation and Display of Diabolic Spectres, 1700-2000” taking place from June 4-5, 2026, at Leuven University. 

Her talk explores stagings of demons, spirits, and sorcerers in court ballet and Romantic ballets, analyzing performative scenes of evil not as primarily visual but as olfactory and multimodal configurations. By taking possession of space, odors create environments and configurations that can function both as evidence of evil’s presence and as its instrument of magic. Reading olfactory mises-en-scènes of evil alongside the increasing pollution of urban air by sulfuric and other industrial fumes in cities such as Paris, the paper asks how conceptualizations of the smell of evil changed: from demonic scenes of hellish odors in the ancien régime to Romantic specters and spirits, evil becomes increasingly associated with floral scents, thereby feminizing and othering nature as a sphere of malicious attraction. Evil, thus the paper’s argument, cannot be reduced to performative figurations; instead, it must be understood as a multimodal atmospheric phenomenon, embedded in changing epistemologies of the nose.