Professor Samalin will be sharing a book chapter called “The Age of Obscenity,” which connects the debates surrounding the passage of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act to contemporary questions about secularization, affect, and free speech. The book is a historical study of the role that the emotion of disgust played in various domains of 19th-century social transformation; this chapter is specifically about the law, disgust, and pollution. He will be making the case for understanding more recent developments in the discourse of free speech and censorship in light of these Victorian antecedents.