Xuelei Huang will introduce her new book, which presents a vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history through an eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the ‘smellscapes’ of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.

Dr Xuelei Huang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on sensory history, film history and media culture in modern China. Her publications include Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell (Cambridge, 2023), Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (Brill, 2014), Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (co-edited with Shengqing Wu, Routledge, 2022), and journal articles in Modern Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Twentieth-Century China, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas, among others. She is the recipient of the Ruprecht Karls Prize for Best Dissertation in Heidelberg, an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, and grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.