New Ph.D. position available in Odeuropa project (ARU Cambridge & VU Amsterdam)

This PhD project will offer the student an opportunity to explore the use of smell – both stories connected to smell and physical scents – in cultural heritage institutions in Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of the PhD project is to provide an overview of smell’s historical and continued role in heritage and museum practice. However, the PhD student will also be given support to identify and follow their own nose when it comes to choosing case studies for detailed examination. Methodologies from museum studies, public history, and cultural history will be deployed as part of the project. The chief aims of the PhD project will be to:

  • Understand how scents have been used in museums and heritage spaces.
  • Trace the different narratives and stories told about smells and smelling in these spaces.
  • Understand how scents and narratives shaped the public’s experience of museums and heritage.

This project will involve the use of a varied collection of sources, including archival material relating to the history of smell; literature relating to museums, exhibitions, and heritage practice; museum site-visits and observation; and interviews with curators and heritage professionals about how they have used smell in their work. This studentship forms part of the ‘Odeuropa’ project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004469. The aim of this project is to identify and preserve the smells of Europe as part of our cultural heritage. ODEUROPA: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research is the first European initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the importance of smells and smelling in connection with works of art, places, people and traditions. You can read more about the aims of the project, its methodology, and consortium on the project website. The project and PhD studentship will start on the 1st of January 2021 and run for 3 years.

This is a double PhD degree run between Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (ARU) and the Vrije University (VU) in Amsterdam. The candidate will be enrolled at ARU but graduate at the VU and receive a degree from both universities with supervision from both. The student will also have visiting rights at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and there will be additional money to fund travel to Amsterdam and Europe for the purposes of research and engagement with other Odeuropa project members.

Supervisory Team: Dr William Tullett, Lecturer in History (Anglia Ruskin University, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge) and Professor Inger Leemans, Professor of Cultural History (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Faculty of Arts – Principal Investigator on the Odeuropa project of which this studentship forms a part).

We welcome candidates with backgrounds in all academic disciplines. Given the focus of the project, applicants from those holding undergraduate and master’s degrees in History, Heritage, Museum Studies, or Curation would be particularly valued.

For full details on the studentship, including application procedures please view the vacancy on the ARU website. For questions about the studentship or research project, please contact Dr William Tullett.

The deadline for applications is 4 December 2020.

Odeuropa awarded €2.8M grant for research project on European olfactory heritage and sensory mining

The Odeuropa consortium is very proud to announce that it has been awarded a €2.8M grant from the EU Horizon 2020 programme for the project, “ODEUROPA: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research”.

Smell is an urgent topic which is fast gaining attention in different communities. Amongst the questions the Odeuropa project will focus on are: what are the key scents, fragrant spaces, and olfactory practices that have shaped our cultures? How can we extract sensory data from large-scale digital text and image collections? How can we represent smell in all its facets in a database? How should we safeguard our olfactory heritage? And — why should we?

The project bundles an array of academic expertise from across many disciplines—history, art history, computational linguistics, computer vision, semantic web, museology, heritage science, and chemistry, with further expertise from cultural heritage institutes, intangible heritage organisations, policy makers, and the creative and fragrance industries. The team will develop novel methods in sensory mining and olfactory heritage science to collect information about smell from multinational digital text and image collections. The historical scent data will be curated and published in an online Encyclopaedia of Smell Heritage, describing the sensory qualities and meanings of the scents and tracing the storylines of key scents, fragrant places, and olfactory practices. This database will become an archive for the olfactory heritage of Europe, enabling future generations to access and learn about the scented past.

In addition, a selection of European smells will be preserved and ‘reconstructed’ using heritage science techniques. Working with museums, artists, and perfumers the Odeuropa team will curate olfactory events and exhibits and educate heritage visitors on engaging with history through the nose. The ultimate goal of the Odeuropa project is to show that critically engaging our sense of smell and our scent heritage is an important and a viable means for connecting and promoting Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage.



The Odeuropa project will be led by: Inger Leemans (NL-Lab) and Marieke van Erp (DHLab) at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Peter Bell (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg); Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler); Raphaël Troncy (EURECOM Sophia Antipolis); William Tullett (Anglia Ruskin University); Dunja Mladenić (Jožef Stefan Institute); and Matija Strlič (University College London).

Odeuropa’s main collaborating partners: International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF); Olfasense, Mediamatic Amsterdam; Museum Ulm; National and University Library of Slovenia (NULS); Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage (DICH); The Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History; the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO (SNCU); The International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM); and the NOSE Network.

For more information about Odeuropa, please see the pages describing the project mission, methodology, timeline, team members, and advisory board.