Freda presents ”Lingering Regimes: Tracing Extractive Histories in Taiwan’s Cultural Memory and Artistic Production” at the Forum Ostasiatische Kunstgeschichte at the University of Zurich. Focusing on camphor as a sensory and historical medium, the paper traces how Taiwan’s extractive modernities are remembered, sanitised, or unsettled across museums, heritage sites, and contemporary artistic practices. By treating smell as […]

The workshop “Sensing, Sensorik und Sensoren – Medienästhetische Fragestellungen sensorischer Medialität und des Sensing der Nahsinne”  at the “Institut für Sprach-, Medien- undMusikwissenschaft” at Bonn University examines the entanglements of perception, media technology, and aesthetics in the context of sensory cultures. Silke Felber has been invited to talk about “Pattern Matching: Zur spekulativen Operationalisierung desOlfaktorischen” on […]

Freda presents ”Wound to Wall Text – Remembering Taiwan’s Late Martial Law Years in Museum Narratives” at the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) Annual Conference at the University of Portsmouth. The paper explores how body-based, site-responsive artistic practices are translated into museum narratives through processes of sensory mediation, reshaping how Taiwan’s late martial law period is felt, perceived, […]

Silke will present her current research “Crafting Scent, Governing Bodies. The Pomander and Early Modern Knowledge Regimes” at the Odouros Objects conference at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

Silke has been invited to deliver a public lecture at the Deutsches Haus at New York University titled “Olfactory Arts in a Warming World”. Following the lecture, she will be in conversation with Zachary Samalin and Brandon Woolf.

We are delighted to announce that OLFAC team member Freda Fiala has been awarded the inaugural DocSchool PhilKult Award of the University of Vienna for her doctoral research on Taiwan. Three dissertation prizes were awarded, recognising outstanding scholarly achievement in the doctoral programme.  Freda’s dissertation examines contemporary performing arts infrastructures in Taiwan, with a particular focus on institutional experimentation, […]

Silke has been invited to give a lecture at the Kolloquium der Literaturwissenschaft at Universität Erfurt titled “Von Gerüch(t)en: Zum ambigen Wissen des Olfaktorischen”.

In January 2026, Julia traveled to Canada to deliver paper presentations and engage in academic networking with colleagues from the Sensory Studies. The 2026 MLA Convention of the Modern Language Association in Toronto marked the first stop of her trip. She was invited to give a talk on Materializing and Sensing Animal Magnetism’s Ethereal Fluid in the 1780s and […]

Silke has been invited to speak at the conference The Many Meanings of Flora: Re-Evaluating the Aesthetics and Politics of Plants, at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. read more.

Sensing across the Humanities, sciences and Arts From 3–5 December 2025, we, the ERC project OLFAC, held our first international symposium at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna. Over three days, scholars, scientists, and artists came together to investigate how smell intervenes in cultural, aesthetic, and political formations, and how olfactory experience can open new trajectories for research across […]

Die Professur für Wissensgeschichte und die Abteilung Plastische Konzeptionen / Keramik laden zum Get Together mit OLFAC Artists in Residence. Gemeinsam begrüßen wir Choreografin Paola Bianchi und Musiker Stefano Murgia, die bis 12. Dezember 2025 als Artists in Residence im ERC-Projekt OLFAC zu Gast sind. Ihre Residenz widmet sich der Beziehung zwischen Gerüchen, Affekten und Körperbewegungen. Anknüpfend […]

Silke has been invited to speak at the conference Entanglements and Knots: The Crises of Planetary Life in the Hands of the Arts, organized by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik at the Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst (IWK) in Vienna. read more. Her talk addresses the sensory dimensions of climate injustice and explores how artistic practices open up multisensory spaces […]

Museum in Motion: New Frontiers in Chinese Museum Studies Freda talks about ”Attention-Spanning: Live Art and Performance Curating in Taiwan’s Public Museums” at the Museum in Motion: New Frontiers in Chinese Museum Studies conference held at University of Siena, Arezzo Campus.

A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Its Global Connections, University of Edinburgh Freda talks about ”Fictional Genealogies of the South in Contemporary Taiwanese Performance Art” at the conference A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Its Global Connections held at University of Edinburgh.

Freda has been invited to join the Habsburg Central Europe in Global History Summer School organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences | Institute of Culture Studies and the JohannGottfried Herder Research Council in cooperation with the Czech Academy of Sciences, held in Prague. Freda talks about ”Entangled Worlds and the Logistics of Chinese Display in the 1873 […]

Silke has been invited to give a talk in the Sensory Sciences Lecture Series at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

With its focus on Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality, the ASLE 2025 conference took place July 8–11 and engaged with topics that are likewise central to OLFAC. Bringing together scholars from sensory, breath, and smell studies, including a keynote by Hsuan Hsu, this was a great opportunity for us to meet in person with members of […]

Julia at the DSA conference in Washington, D.C.  Under the title Indeterminate States: Bodies, Fields, Praxis, this year’s international conference of the Dance Studies Association addressed the plural meanings of ‘state’ and its current indeterminacies in view of global conflicts. Held at the George Washington University/Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Washington, D.C., the five-day […]

What if we approach performance from the sense of olfaction and multisensorial perceptions? What if it lingered less in the retina – and more in the nose? At this year’s International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) conference, held at the University of Cologne, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald stepped into exactly these questions.  Our panel Carne Vale – Olfactory Becomings invited audiences to consider the […]