Name: Ivan Marković
PhD: Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
Provisional Thesis Title: 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:
Articles
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. (2017) ‘Breathing air, sensing smoke’, The Senses and Society (12) 1. doi: 10.1080/17458927.2017.1268830
Conferences & Scholarly / Public Engagement Activities:
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:
2017:
Other Research Interests:
University email address: Ivan.Markovic1@nottingham.ac.uk
LinkedIn: Ivan Marković
Twitter: @hazyhistories
Other Social Media: