This blogpost was authored by Professor Mark Paterson. Prof. Paterson is based at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and specialises in history and science of bodily sensation, and technologies of the senses. He visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in Summer 2024 to collaborate with Dr. Andy Flack in the Department of History.
The visit from June 21 to July 31, 2024, as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor, turned out to be a highlight of my recent career. I had studied for my Ph.D. at the University of Bristol just over twenty years ago, and a return to the leafy streets and distinctive Victorian buildings was never part of my plan. There was a big difference this time, however. The area of interdisciplinary research that I was involved in back then, the history and philosophy of the senses, was not taken so seriously. Studying this felt like ploughing a lonely furrow, trying to make intellectual allies from people in institutions around the world along the way. It was a chance meeting at a conference in Montreal in 2023 with a History Ph.D. student from the University of Bristol, Lena Ferriday, that revealed quite how much research is now happening across a number of different departments in the group she helps to run (among others) with Dr. Andy Flack, Senior Lecturer in History and my excellent academic host. The ‘Senses and Sensations’ Research Group includes people from across the humanities, social sciences, and the medical school. My six-week visit, co-organized by Lena and Andy, was a chance to meet other group members and start collaborations.
In our plans for the visit, Andy, Lena and I wanted especially to help early-career researchers and Ph.D. students, and set up a series of scheduled Work-in-Progress sessions. We also carried out two workshops with the research group. The first was a collaborative effort to plan and coordinate a journal article publication. The second was a half-day grant-writing workshop, focused on identifying potential funding to expand and strengthen our international network, with members from other institutions including Professor David Howes from Concordia University Montreal, a leading figure in sensory research, and Dr. Will Tullett, a sensory history scholar, from the University of York. We settled on a particular funding opportunity, the AHRC Curiosity Award, and Andy and I have subsequently had a number of meetings to develop the proposal, and we will submit the application this academic year.
Our public event was titled “Sensing the World – An Animal’s Perspective.” It featured Dr. Nathan Morehouse from the University of Cincinnati, one of our proposed research grant collaborators, who presented on ‘The Evolution of Looking and Seeing: New Insights from Colorful Jumping Spiders’. My talk was designed to provide some wider, more-than–human sensory context for Nate’s talk, inspired by the ethologist Jacob von Uexküll, ‘A Wander Through the Perceptual Worlds of Animals and Humans: More-than-Human Sensing’. This event drew over fifty participants joining from all over the world.
While the Distinguished Visiting Professor visit was full of planned activities with members of the research group, there were other enriching opportunities as well. For example, after the initial welcome lecture and reception, I was invited to speak at the Bristol Interaction Group (BIG) in the Queen’s Building, and several of their members are researching the role of touch in human-computer interfaces. Other highlights included meeting with Professor of Philosophy James Ladyman to discuss AI, robots, and complex systems, as well as Professor of Robotics Nathan Lepora, whose work on touch and dexterity led to a guided tour of the Bristol Robotics Lab with Dr. Ben Ward-Cherrier, a member of Lepora’s Dextrous Robotics team (see picture).
The work started during the visit this summer is continuing through grant applications and through publication, and I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity to spend time with such excellent and inspiring people in Bristol.