Page History

Name: Ivan MarkovicMarković

PhD: Critical Theory and Cultural Studies

Provisional Thesis Title: Hazy atmospheres: a sensory history of smoking and vaping, c. 1880 - present 

Thesis Description:

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 Hazy histories: Smoking atmospheres in twentieth-century Britain

Thesis Description:

This thesis an epistemological experiment in knowing the past atmospherically. It seeks to address the question of how we might go about recovering, from the historical record, something as hazy, fleeting and potentially intangible as an atmosphere. The thesis tells a story of smoking at four key moments in twentieth century British history: the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and lastly, the mid-2000s. The story is narrated through the lens of atmosphere to tease out and foreground the feelings, emotions, senses, rhythms and affects that otherwise remain a backdrop in conventional historical accounts.
The thesis adapts Sumartojo and Pink’s (2018) tripartite approach of knowing about, through and in atmosphere to archival research, and draws on a wide range of material, from newspaper articles, magazines, etiquette guides and diaries to letters, film, photography and material culture. It re-visits sources already considered by historians of smoking, while also introducing as yet unexamined material. The thesis then proposes four specific modes of attunement, materiality, time, conviviality and space, through which the four moments of the smoking past are examined, and past atmospheres conjured. Finally, the thesis makes the case for storytelling as a form of narration that has the unique capacity to compel an atmospheric attunement between the reader and the text, an experiential closeness and intimacy not always required or evoked by academic work, but one that has the potential to regain and hold a past atmosphere in the present.

Contents:

ABSTRACT  | i
ILLUSTRATIONS | iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | iv
AUTHOR’S DECLARATION | vi
1. Lighting up | 1
2. In the air | 12
3. Smoking out atmosphere | 38
4. Desiring atmosphere | 79
5. Wartime atmospheres | 117
6. Toxic atmospheres | 152
7. Purifying atmospheres | 185
8. Stubbing out | 213
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 222

Supervisors and Institution(s): 

Dr Tracey Potts (University of Nottingham)

Dr James Mansell (University of Nottingham)

Publications (please include full details with page nos. or web links):

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Publications:

Articles

• Marković, I. (2019) 'Out of place, out of time: towards a more-than-human rhythmanalysis of smoking'. cultural geographies (26)4: 487-503.

• Marković, I. (2019) 'Vaping like a chimney: skeuomorphic assemblages and post-smoking geographies'. Social & Cultural Geography. [Online first]https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1593491

Book Reviews

• Marković, I. (2019) ‘Review of The Geography of the Everyday: Toward and Understanding of the Given’, AAG Review of Books 7(2).
• Marković, I. (2018) 'In the mood...', Cultural Politics (14) 2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-6609312

• Marković, I. (2017) ‘Breathing air, sensing smoke’, The Senses and Society (12) 1. doi: 10.1080/17458927.2017.1268830

Conferences & Scholarly / Public Engagement Activities:

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Other Research Interests:

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2019:

• ‘On the abundance of absence: second-hand smoke and the emergence of toxic atmospheres in the 1980s workplace’, RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 2019.

2018:

• Sensing past atmospheres; a green silk kimono and the sensory politics of smoking c.1880 – 1930.  - conference paper presented at AAG 2018 in New Orleans, US, 10-14 April

2017:

• 'Locating selfish stinkers'; smoking and everyday sensory histories - conference paper presented at 80^th Anniversary Mass Observation conference at University of Sussex, Brighton, 10-17 July
  
  
• Smoking, agency and the everyday; towards a more-than-human rhythmanalysis - paper presented at University of Nottingham, Health Humanities' Early Bird research group, 19 July

Other Research Interests:

• sensory history, material culture, (affective) atmospheres, rhythmanalysis, ethnography, smoking, vaping