• Early Modern Travel Writing
• Sensory Studies
• History of Smell
• Smellscapes
• Olfactory Heritage

I am one of the teaching and research assistants at the chair of Prof. Dr. Isabel Karremann, where I am pursuing my PhD in Early Modern Literature in English. I hold a BA in Italian Philology and an MA in Italian and English Language and Literature. I have worked as a translator, interpreter, and English linguist on speech recognition systems, including Amazon Alexa.

My PhD project, entitled “Smelling New Worlds”, investigates the olfactory dimension of the early modern English literature of discovery, chiefly accounts of navigations east to Persia, the Levant and the Indies, and west to America. The core texts are Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598–1600) and Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus (1625). The thesis proceeds through four recurring smellscapes – the wilderness, the sacred, the marketplace and the household – tracing how foreign smells were absorbed into everyday life in England.

Several central questions guide the research:

• What does odour do in the constitution of place, and what knowledge does smelling claim?
• Can olfactory description convey a scent to readers who have never smelled it, or only a script for imagining one?
• How do we study a sense a culture declined to record, and what does its reconstruction evidence?

The project works at the intersection of early modern travel writing and sensory history.

Since 2024, I have been a member of the Smell Studies Group, where I am also in charge of the reading group.

Publications

• Morenets, Olena. “Sweet Bags as Embodied Artifacts of Olfactory Heritage.” Arts, vol. 14, no. 6, Dec. 2025, article 170, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14060170.
• Morenets, Olena. “Reconsidering the Origins of Smellscapes: Insights from Late Medieval and Early Modern Travel Narratives (Mandeville, Moryson, and Hakluyt).” European Journal of Geography, vol. 16, no. 1, Mar. 2025, pp. s111–s113, https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.si.spat.hum.o.mor.101.113.

Conference participation

• June 2023: “The Smellscapes of Early Modern Travel Writing.” EMSE 2023: Early Modern Sensory Encounters, Kellogg College, Oxford.
• Michaelmas term 2023: “The Materiality of Smell Perception in Early Modern Travel Writing.” Material Culture in the Early Modern World, University of Cambridge.
• June 2024: “Travelling Across Smell Borders: ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ Encounters in Early Modern Travel Writing.” EMSE 2024: Early Modern Sensory Subjectivities, University of Oxford.
• July 2024: “Smell Aesthetic in Women's Early Modern Medical Writings.” Writing the World: Early Modern Women, Natural Philosophy and Medicine, University of York.
• September 2024: “The Peculiar World of Spatial Smellscapes in Travel History from the Late Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century.” Spatial Humanities 2024, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg.
• November 2024: “Sensual Exclusion: Locals vs Travellers.” Conjunctures of Hospitality, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon.

• BA Seminar: “Sensing New Worlds: Early Modern Travel Literature” (HS 26)
• Introductory module: “English Literature: Textual Analysis” (HS 26 – FS 27)

I am happy to supervise BA theses in any of the areas listed under “Research Interests”, and I am open to other topics as well. Feel free to write me an e-mail so we can meet to discuss your ideas.