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Intimate Subjects with Simeon Koole

Wed, Jan 29

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Intimate Subjects with Simeon Koole

Join NACBS to celebrate Simeon Koole’s recent work Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age. Julia Laite will join Simeon Koole in conversation.

Intimate Subjects with Simeon Koole
Intimate Subjects with Simeon Koole

Time & Location

Jan 29, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

Intimate Subjects with Simeon Koole

About the event

Join NACBS to celebrate Simeon Koole’s recent work Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age. Julia Laite will join Simeon Koole in conversation.


Wednesday, January 29

12pm ET/ 10am MST/ 5pm GMT


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An insightful history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain told through a single sense: touch.


When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present.


Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge.


With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.


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Julia Laite is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She researches and teaches on the history of gender, crime and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth century British world. Her most recent book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (Profile, 2021) won the Golden Dagger for Non-Fiction from the Crime Writer’s Association.  Her new project will be a historical biography of Shanawdithit, an Indigenous woman in colonial Newfoundland.

 

Simeon Koole is a historian of modern Britain and its global entanglements at the University of Bristol. He specializes in the history of the senses and sexuality, and works at the intersection of queer studies, history of science, phenomenology, and global history. His book Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age was published by Chicago University Press in 2024. His next book examines bodily and affective practices of 'worldmaking' in London's docklands at the height of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalisation.





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