Join us for an evening immersion into the senses

6 pm: Taste: sample tantalizing mocktails and savory bites | Music by The Billy Rosen Duo: 6-6:30 and 7:15-8 pm

6:30 pm: The Senses of Scent: Perfume and the Stories They Tell | Guest Speaker: Richard Stamelman

7:15-8:15 pm: Taste: Fancy Cake Tasting | Artisan Cakes made by Baker Extraordinaire, Jodi Kelly | Cakes: Chocolate Swirl Pavlova with Whipped Cream and Raspberries | Gingerbread Bundt Cake with Cinnamon Rum Icing | Citrus Rose Battenberg Cake | Pear Cardamom Cake with Brown Butter Frosting and Caramel Glaze | Clementine Cake with Citrus Curd

Lecture Summary: Perfume is more than the fragrance it releases into the air, more than a combination of molecules reaching the brain more rapidly than the stimuli released by any of the other four senses. Perfume, what Shakespeare called this “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,” has a history, an architecture, a structure, a style, a spirit, an aura, an “imaginary”: in other words, an expressive language and vocabulary, and the constellation of images it evokes in music, art, literature, poetry, and advertising, all join forces to tell a story. Perfume, as the product of history and of culture, expresses and embodies the values, beliefs, and desires of that culture. The lecture will tell these stories. Richard Stamelman is an emeritus professor of French and Comparative Literature at Williams College.  He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Colorado, Dartmouth College, and William and Mary and was the Executive Director of Dartmouth’s Montgomery Endowment from 2008 to 2012. He is the author of Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry and Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin. A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present, as well as other books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth century French literature, art, photography, and culture.

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