Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
In this talk, Dr Sophie Vohra explores the sensory life of museum collections - shaped not just by vision, but by touch, sound, smell, memory and the lived experiences of the people who care for them. She asks what changes when we stop treating museums as primarily visual spaces and begin to recognise them as multisensory environments.
Drawing on research into disability gain and sensory diversity, the talk invites audiences to imagine museums differently: not as neutral spaces to observe, but as places where every body senses, interprets and connects in their own way. When no single sense is necessary or sufficient, history becomes richer, stranger and more inclusive.
Leeds Cultural Conversations is a series of public lectures organised by the Centre for Culture and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. The series is run in partnership with Leeds Central Library and each event showcases a different piece of leading research being undertaken by our academic colleagues to a wider public audience, with discussion and debate encouraged by all that attend.
Sophie is an academic and professional public historian. She has worked across a number of roles in different types of organisations in the UK heritage sector since 2012.
She is currently a Research Officer at Leeds Beckett University. In this role, she supports the impact case studies for the History department for REF 2029. During this time, she is also expanding her publishing portfolio and exploring funding opportunities for her own research.
Prior to this, Sophie was a Research Associate on ‘The Sensational Museum’ with Museum Studies & Institute for Digital Culture at University of Leicester. Her work on the 'Collections' strand of this 2.5-year project addressed intersectional ability diversity, access, equity and ‘the sensory’ in museum collections interactions and information, and namely how this is collected, stored and shared in the digital realm.
She was also research associate in the Collections and Research department at the National Railway Museum (Science Museum Group), with whom she also completed her Collaborative PhD on the commemorative cultures of British railways, in partnership with the University of York (supervised by Mr Ed Bartholomew and Dr Geoff Cubitt).
She is a Fellow of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, and an Associate of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP) at the University of York.
