Manon Raffard

Manon Raffard (she/her) holds PhD in French Studies from the Université de Bourgogne Europe (Dijon, France). Her doctoral dissertation focused on the literary and cultural interactions between olfaction and conceptual knowledge in France between 1857 and 1914. She is currently editing said dissertation to be turned into an academic monograph.

As a Hallsworth Research Fellow, she examines how olfaction mediates experiences of both environmental disparities and socio-economic inequalities in nineteenth-century Paris and, to a lesser extent, Manchester.

• Sensory studies: smell studies; cultures of olfaction; history of olfaction; history of the senses.
• Environmental studies: environmental humanities; environmental history (esp. history of environmental policy); ecocriticism; ecopoetics; plant studies.
• Class studies: poverty; socio-environmental disparities; elitism; socio-economic inequality; socio-political oppression and violence; spatial inequality.
• Science and Technology studies: history of sensory knowledge and sciences; olfactory and atmospheric technologies; olfactory epistemologies; olfactory cosmologies; historical epistemology; epistemocriticism.
• Nineteenth-century French studies: French-language fiction c. 1848-1914; Naturalist novels; Symbolist poetry; Fin-de-siècle culture; literature and science; literature and social discourse; literature and olfactory aesthetics.

• Textual methods: stylistics; poetics; close reading; discourse analysis.
• Historical methods: archival methods; cultural history; social history; intellectual and scientific history.
• Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary methods: qualitative methods; mixed-sources methods; critical theory; sensory mining; embodied epistemologies.

• December 2025 –: Fellows' Representative for the Humanities, Fellows Strategy Group, Research Committee, University of Manchester.
• September 2025 –: Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Recherche "Sociétés, Sensibilités, Soin" (UMR 7366). Associated research member. Link to profile.
• April 2025 –: European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (dir. Bénédicte Meillon). Social media liaison in charge of the BlueSky account.
• 2023 –: Australian Society for French Studies (ASFS) Mentorship Program. Mentor: Gemma King (Australian National University).
• September 2022 –: Smell Studies Group (SSG), dir. Chanelle Dupuis (Brown University). Co-contributor and co-moderator of the Smell Studies social media accounts with Chanelle Dupuis.
• September 2019 –: Littérature, arts mineurs, arts Majeurs (LmM). Active research team member. Supervision: Vanessa Besand, Virginie Brinker, Henri Garric (Université de Bourgogne).
• September 2019 –: Centre Pluridisciplinaire Textes et Cultures (UR 4178). Associated research unit member. Link to profile.
• Learned societies and scientific association memberships: Societé des Etudes Romantiques et Dixneuvièmistes (SERD), Society of Dixneuvièmistes (SDN), Odeuropa Network (https://odeuropa.eu/network/), International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (INCSA), European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE), Australian Society for French Studies (ASFS), Center for Sensory Studies’s Next-Generation Sensory Studies Scholars, Friends of the Public Domain Review (PDR), History of Science Society (HSS), European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), Réseau Universitaire de Chercheurs en Histoire Environnmentale (RUCHE).