Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

In Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics-a scientific movement originating in Germany and dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience-shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Thr...