Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Biographies of Contributors

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Hans J. Rindisbacher was born in Switzerland. MA in English and German from the University of Bern, 1983; PhD from Stanford University, 1989, in German Studies. Professor of German Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, since 1995. Research focus on the intersection of perception, notably the sense of smell, and its textual encodings, and on the representation and communication of sensory experience/embodiment in general. He published The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), a groundbreaking study of literary olfactory representations, followed by articles on Wilhelm Raabe, Patrick Süskind, and others. He is also interested in the role of Swiss literature within German studies. “Smells of Switzerland,” published in Approaches in Teaching Modern Switzerland: From Multiculturalism to Cultural Hybridity, ed. Margrit Zinggeler and Karin Baumgartner (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2010), he combines these main research interests.He is presently at work on a project on the roles of perfumery and cosmetics in the Nazi era, and a study of so far neglected sources for Süskind’s Perfume.