Emotions Make History: Recent Episodes
The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800)
Emotions shape individual, community and national identities. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) uses historical knowledge from Europe, 1100=1800, to understand the long history of emotional behaviours. Based at The University of Western Australia, with additional nodes at the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Queensland and Sydney, CHE investigates how European societies thought, felt and functioned, and how these changes impact life in Australia today.
More at: www.historyofemotions.org.au
In this podcast Bastian Phelan, Outreach Officer at the Sydney node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, interviews Umberto Grassi about his time as a researcher with CHE. Umberto was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Centre at The University of Sydney from 2015 to 2018. His CHE research project was titled 'Ambiguous Boundaries: Sex Crimes and Cross-cultural Encounters in the Early Modern Mediterranean World’. Umberto is currently a Marie Curie Global Fellow, based at the University of Verona with a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Maryland.
In this podcast Bastian Phelan, Outreach Officer at the Sydney node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, interviews Rebecca McNamara about her time as a researcher with CHE. Una was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Centre at The University of Sydney from 2011 to 2014. Her CHE research project, 'Emotions and the Suicidal Impulse in the Medieval World' examined emotions related to cases of suicide or attempted suicide found in chronicles and legal records from c.1200–1550. Rebecca is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Westmont College, Santa Barbara.
Adam Hembree is a PhD candidate in English at The University of Melbourne. He researches the discursive similarities between early modern writings on staged action and magic as passionate practices. His other research interests include the philosophy of language, etymology, monstrosity, and intersections between cognitive science and literature. Adam also produces and performs improvised theatre in Melbourne. This paper, ‘Lexical Feeling: Language as Emotional Technology’, was delivered at ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’ at The University of Western Australia, in June 2018.
In this podcast Bastian Phelan, Outreach Officer at the Sydney node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, interviews Una McIlvenna about her time as a researcher with CHE. Una was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Centre at The University of Sydney from 2011 to 2014. Her CHE research project, 'Singing the News of Death: Song in Early Modern European Execution (1500–1900)’ examined emotional responses to public execution in the early modern period, looking in particular at the use of songs and verse in accounts of crime and execution across Europe. Una is currently a Hansen Lecturer in history at The University Melbourne.
James L. Smith is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on intellectual history, medieval abstractions and visualisation schemata, environmental humanities and water history. His first monograph, Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism was published by Brepols in 2017. James is the editor of The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (Punctum, 2017), and co-editor of a themed collection for the Open Library of the Humanities on ‘New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies’ (forthcoming, 2018). He is currently shaping a digital/environmental humanities project titled ‘Deep Mapping the Spiritual Waterscape of Ireland’s Lakes: The Case of Loch Derg, Donegal’. This paper, ‘Toxic Emotions: Riparian Personification and Pollution, Past, Present and Future’, was delivered at ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’ at The University of Western Australia, in June 2018.
Shino Konishi is a Lecturer in History and Indigenous Studies at The University of Western Australia, and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She is Aboriginal and identifies with the Yawuru people of Broome. This paper, 'Emotional Exchanges: Gift-Giving in Cross-Cultural Encounters', was delivered at ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’ at The University of Western Australia, in June 2018.
Katie Barclay is a EURIAS Fellow at AIAS, Aarhus Universitet, and a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Adelaide. She is an historian of family life, gender and emotion, and has published widely in these areas. Her publications include: Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester University Press, 2011); Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, State and Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), edited with Merridee Bailey; and Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), edited with Kimberley Reynolds and Ciara Rawnsley. She is co-editor of Emotions: History, Culture, Society, and is currently completing a monograph on how to understand the collective emotions of eighteenth-century lower order Scots. This paper, ‘Precarious Emotions: Quantification, Big Data and the History of Emotions’ was delivered as a keynote lecture at a conference on ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations without Borders’ at The University of Western Australia in June 2018.
Moisés Prieto completed his PhD at the University of Zurich in 2013. His doctoral research focused on Swiss media perception of the late Franco regime and the Spanish democratisation process (published in 2015 by Böhlau). His research interests include media history, microhistory, the history of emotions, the history of migration and authoritarian systems and historical semantics. He is co-author of Tele-revista y la Transición (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015). From 2014 to 2015 he was a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College (University of Oxford), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Humboldt University since 2016, and is currently working on dictatorial narratives during the first half of the long nineteenth century. This paper, ‘Shaping the Tyrant: The Role of Emotions in Nineteenth-Century Accounts on the Argentine Dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas (1830s–1850s)’, was delivered at ‘Emotions of Cultures/Cultures of Emotions: Comparative Perspectives’, the inaugural conference of the Society for the History of Emotions in December 2017.
In this podcast, Melissa Raine, an Honorary Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and Rob Grout, a PhD candidate at the University of York, examine medieval childhood and emotions in their discussion of the fifteenth-century poem, 'The Childhood of Christ'. This poem survives in a manuscript owned and compiled by Robert Thornton. It is now housed in the British Library.
In this podcast, CHE Education and Outreach Officer Penelope Lee and Media Officer Emma Miller interview Sophie Cope, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham. Sophie's PhD, 'Making Time Material: Domestic Dated Objects in Seventeenth-Century England', examines popular ideas of time in the seventeenth century and their expression in material culture. She is author of the chapter 'Women in the Sea of Time: Domestic Dated Objects in Seventeenth-Century England', in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, a volume edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions based at The University of Adelaide. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society', a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions) and a EURIAS Marie Curie Fellow at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. In this 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' podcast, Katie discusses the history of loneliness.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions based at The University of Adelaide. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society', a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions) and a EURIAS Marie Curie Fellow at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. In this 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' podcast, Katie discusses family and how it is remembered and commemorated.
‘The Voices of Women will be performed at the Melbourne Recital Centre (Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, cnr Southbank Boulevard and Sturt Street, Melbourne) on 20 March 2018. In this podcast, CHE Deputy Director and leader of the Performance Program Jane Davidson talks to Marshall McGuire (Ludovico’s Band) about baroque female composers, historical music performances and emotions. Tickets for the event can be purchased at: https://www.melbournerecital.com.au/events/2018/the-voices-of-women/. Being a woman in the male-dominated music industry is difficult enough today, so what would it have been like 400 years ago? This concert will enable audiences to catch a glimpse into the world of three Baroque female composers. Melbourne’s renowned Ludovico’s Band (www.ludovicosband.com) will team up with composer and soprano Helen Thomson to perform ‘The Voices of Women’. The performance will feature works by composers Isabella Leonarda, Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, who were all active in Italy in the seventeenth century, and who enjoyed varying degrees of success during their lifetimes.
Carol Williams is an adjunct research fellow with the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University has an established academic career in both musicology and history. She is one of the collaborating editors and translators of the Ars Musice of Johannes de Grocheio (Medieval Institute Publications, 2011) and the Tractatus de tonis of Guy of Saint-Denis (Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). Her other publications include the essays ‘Modes and Manipulation: Music, the State, and Emotion’ and ‘The Tonary as Analytic Guidebook for the Performance of Chant’. She is also a performing musician, singing and playing in the early music ensemble, Acord. This paper – ‘Affects and Passions of the Soul: Aristotelian Influence in Music Theory’ – was delivered at ‘Emotions of Cultures/Cultures of Emotions: Comparative Perspectives’, the inaugural conference of the Society for the History of Emotions in December 2017.
Kellie Robertson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Her current book project, Yesterday’s Weather: Narrative and Premodern Climate Change, examines how medieval and early modern societies depict the shock of natural disaster. This paper, ‘Thinking the Unthinkable: Belief, Climate Change and Premodern Weather’ was delivered as part of a seminar series on ‘Belief’ at The University of Queensland in November 2017.
Brydie-Leigh Bartleet is Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre and Deputy Director (Research) at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, Australia. She has worked on a range of national and international projects in community music, arts-based service learning with Australian First Peoples, arts programs in prisons, and global mobility. She serves on the Board of Australia’s peak music advocacy body, Music Australia, and has served as Chair and Commissioner of the International Society for Music Education’s Community Music Activities Commission. She is the co-founder of the Asia Pacific Community Music Network, and is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Community Music. This keynote lecture, ‘How Can Concepts of Love Inform Peacebuilding and Empathy in Intercultural Music Making?’, was delivered at a conference on ‘Peace, Empathy and Conciliation Through Music’ that was hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, together with the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, at The University of Melbourne in September 2017.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions based at The University of Adelaide. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society' and a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions) and a EURIAS Marie Curie Fellow at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. In this 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' podcast, Katie discusses the power of emotions to enact social change.
Michael Barbezat is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. He holds an MA in Medieval History from the University of California at Davis (2006) and a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto (2013). Michael’s research focuses on connections between religious ideologies and conceptions of society, geography and identity, particularly in the fields of medieval historiography and literature. He is currently writing a monograph titled 'Burning Bodies: Community, Eschatology and Identity in the Middle Ages', which will be published by Cornell University Press in 2018. This paper, ‘Curiosity that Becomes Something Else: The Desire to See and to Speak with the Dead in English Twelfth-Century Sources’, was delivered at a conference on ‘The Natural and the Supernatural in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds’ at The University of Western Australia in October 2017.
Amy Milka is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Adelaide. Her research considers the affective language of the courtroom in English criminal courts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper, ‘Reporting Courtroom Emotions in Eighteenth-Century London’, was presented at a conference on ‘News Reporting and Emotion’ at The University of Adelaide in September 2017.
Una McIlvenna is the Hansen Lecturer in History at The University of Melbourne, and a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her research interests lie broadly in the fields of cultural and literary history, as well as in an ongoing project on emotional responses to the use of song and verse in accounts of crime and public execution in early modern Europe. She is the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (Routledge, 2016), and she is currently working on a second monograph titled ‘Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe, 1550-1900’. This paper, ‘The Emotions of Performing the News in Early Modern Europe’, was delivered at a conference on ‘News Reporting and Emotions’ at The University of Adelaide in September 2017.
Joshua Scodel is Helen A. Regenstein Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of Chicago. His research focuses on early modern English literature in relation to classical literature and philosophy, and to intellectual, cultural and political history. He is the author of The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Cornell University Press, 1991) and Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2002), and of numerous articles on topics ranging from Donne and Jonson, to English translations of classical and continental lyrics, Cavalier love poetry, Interregnum retirement literature, the Restoration Pindaric ode, the English lyric 1650-1740, seventeenth-century English literary criticism, and Dryden's critical principles. This paper, ‘The Poetics of Care in Seventeenth-Century England’ was delivered at a conference on ‘Art and Affect’ at The University of Queensland in July 2017.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions based at The University of Adelaide. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society' and a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions). In this podcast, the eighth in our 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie discusses the history of love, marriage and regulation.
Ross Knecht is Assistant Professor of English at Emory University, and a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His research focuses on early modern literature, critical theory and the history of philosophy, and he is currently completing a book on the intersection of emotion and education in sixteenth-century English literature. This paper, ‘Reproduction, Affect and Pedagogy in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ explores the representation of biological reproduction and poetic memorialisation in Shakespeare. It was delivered at a conference on ‘Art and Affect’ at The University of Queensland in July 2017.
Kirk Essary is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. His research focuses on intellectual and religious history in sixteenth-century Europe, particularly the works of Erasmus and Calvin. He is the author of Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God: Reason and Emotion in the Christian Philosophy (University of Toronto Press, 2017). This paper, ‘Erasmus on the Arts in Luther’s Reformation: A Tragedy’, considers the role of emotions discourse in attitudes toward the arts in Erasmus’ works, with a specific focus on the early years of the Reformation. It was delivered at a conference on ‘Art and Affect’ at The University of Queensland in July 2017.
The Tale of Orpheus will be performed at the Meat Market Theatre in North Melbourne, 7-8 September 2017. In this podcast, Jane Davidson (Artistic Director) and David Greco (Orfeo) discuss Monteverdi, emotions and historical music performances. Tickets for the event can be purchased at: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-tale-of-orpheus-by-claudio-monteverdi-tickets-35869349189.
The Tale of Orpheus reimagines Claudio Monteverdi’s baroque masterpiece L’Orfeo ‒ arguably the first ‘true’ opera ‒ for the twenty-first century. Known to his contemporaries as an 'oracolo della musica', Monteverdi was a musical visionary. His talent for communicating emotion, and using it as a powerful driving force, explains L’Orfeo’s enduring appeal today. This production explores the work’s creative potential even further, in a modern re-telling of one of the most influential and beloved stories in operatic history.
The Tale of Orpheus has been produced by the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at The University of Melbourne in association with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University, Professor Emeritus at Brown University and a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Advisory Board. His research focuses on ancient Greek and Latin literature, especially comedy and the novel, and classical philosophy. This lecture, which asks ‘Did Aristotle Recognise Aesthetic Emotions?’, was delivered at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/igrct) at the University of Bristol in April 2017. It is the first Sir Jeremy Morse IGRCT Lecture. A video of the lecture can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ei8VkZPQgw&t=76s. A published version of the paper is forthcoming in a volume by Cambridge University Press. With thanks to the IGRCT for sharing their recording.
David Lemmings is Professor of History at The University of Adelaide and a Chief Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He has published extensively on the socio-cultural history of law and the legal professions in eighteenth-century Britain. He is the author of Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2015); and the editor of Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Ashgate, 2012); and (with Ann Brooks), Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (Routledge, 2014, 2016). This paper – ‘Emotions, Power and Popular Opinion about the Administration of Justice: The English Experience, from Coke’s “Artificial Reason” to the Sensibility of “True Crime Stories”’ – was delivered as a keynote address at a conference on ‘Powerful Emotions / Emotions and Power’ at the University of York in June 2017. An expanded version of this paper has been published in Emotions: History, Culture, Society 1.1 (2017).
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions. She is currently a DECRA Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society' and a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions). In this podcast, the sixth in our 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie discusses the iconography of children and its emotional impact.
William Skinner is a cultural anthropologist at The University of Adelaide. His research focuses on the changing relationship of viticulture to notions of cultural identity and heritage, and his PhD thesis explored how local wine producers experienced, understood and represented place and landscape in South Australia. This paper was delivered at a public panel on ‘Drinking to Remember: History, Memory and the Story of South Australian Wine’ that was organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions as part of South Australia’s 2017 History Festival.
Kathryn Prince is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely on Shakespeare in performance from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and was an Early Career Visiting Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in 2015. Her current work focuses on the practice of emotions in early modern drama. This paper was delivered at a conference on ‘Hamlet and Emotion: Then and Now’ at The University of Western Australia on 10 April 2017. In order to illuminate the myriad intersections of memory, action and emotion in Hamlet, it compares multiple texts and performances, drawing on theories about acting techniques, textual transmission, action analysis and emotions as a practice.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions. She is currently a DECRA Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society' and a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions). In this podcast, the fifth in our 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie discusses the relationship of historians to the past, the archive and their sources.
Andrew Lynch is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Professor of English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia. He has published extensively on medieval English literature and medievalism. He is the editor, with Stephanie Downes and Katrina O’Loughlin, of Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); with Michael Champion, of Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (Brepols, 2015); and, with Louise D’Arcens, of International Medievalism and Popular Culture (Cambria Press, 2014). This paper was delivered at a symposium on ‘Hamlet and Emotions: Then and Now’ at The University of Western Australia on 10 April 2017.
Richard Meek is a Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, specialising in Shakespeare and early modern literature. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, which was published by Ashgate in 2009, and a number of edited collections. He is currently completing a book on sympathy in early modern literature and culture, provisionally titled The Relativity of Sorrows. This paper, '"For by the image of my cause, I see / The portraiture of his": Hamlet and the Imitation of Emotion', was delivered at a symposium on ‘Hamlet and Emotions: Then and Now’ at The University of Western Australia on 10 April 2017.
Benno Gammerl is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development's Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin. He is currently working on a research project that examines emotions in cross-cultural perspective. This paper, ‘Curtains Up! New Venues for Gay Men and Shifting Emotional Styles Since the 1960s’, was delivered as a keynote address at the ‘First International Conference on Contemporary and Historical Approaches to Emotions’ at the University of Wollongong on 5 December 2016. It investigates how spatial settings informed emotional patterns and practices by analysing the changing spaces within which male same-sex encounters have taken place in West Germany since the 1960s. The names of interview subjects have been changed.
Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Southern Cross University and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her new book, A Critical Genealogy of Normality, which she co-authored with Peter Cryle, is forthcoming with Chicago University Press in 2017. This paper, ‘Queer Sensations: Towards an Affective Genealogy of the Modern Body’, was delivered as a keynote address at the ‘First International Conference on Contemporary and Historical Approaches to Emotions’ at the University of Wollongong on 6 December 2016. It draws on recent work in feminist affect studies and cultural histories of emotion to develop the idea of an ‘affective genealogy’. The case of James Tilly Matthews, a man committed to the Bedlam Lunatic Asylum in 1797 for claiming that his body and brain were being controlled by a secret machine, Stephens suggests, is representative of a transformation of the human sensorium by the start of the Industrial Age.
Listen to Katie Barclay, a historian at The University of Adelaide, talk about the work of historians and nostalgia on present day politics. Katie is also Co-Editor of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary biannual 'Emotions, History, Culture, Society' journal published under the auspices of the Society for the History of Emotions.
Brandon Chua is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland. He researches Restoration drama and poetry. He is currently working on a project that explores ideas of religious freedom during the English Civil War and the Restoration, and another that examines the role of gender in the construction of political subjectivities in works by John Milton, Nicholas Rowe and Eliza Haywood. This paper, ‘Embodying the Common Good: Reconstituting the Body of State on the Post-Regicide Stage’, was delivered at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. In the paper, Brandon examines the rise of the ‘She-Tragedy’ in the seventeenth century, suggesting that it sheds light on a perceived conflict between existing theatrical modes based on embodiment and an emerging form of popular sovereignty modelled on a more depersonalised notion of ‘common good’.
Leigh Penman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland. He is currently working on a project concerning Dissenting religious subcultures in Protestant northern Europe during the early modern period, focusing on transnational networks. This paper, ‘The Modernity of Lost Causes’: Frances Yates, Shakespeare and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment’, was delivered at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. In the paper, Leigh considers Frances Yates’s work The Rosicrucian Enlightenment in the context of her larger project to create a European intellectual history that revolved around hermeneutic philosophy.
Samantha Dieckmann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Melbourne. Working with Jane Davidson and Multicultural Arts Victoria, Samantha's research explores the deployment of music for conciliation as it relates to personal, religious and political areas of conflict, and emotional community and empathy as resolution. This paper, ‘Restaging Fear: Affective Translation through Intercommunity Performing Arts’ was delivered at the ‘First International Conference on Contemporary and Historical Approaches to Emotions’ at the University of Wollongong on 5 December 2016. It considers Intercultural and interfaith performing arts practices as spaces that facilitate the galvanisation of emotions, and suggests that music and spoken word can be used to construct affective states and activate change.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions. She is currently a DECRA Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide, editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society' and a member of the Council for The Society for the History of Emotions (www.historyofemotions.org.au/society-for-the-history-of-emotions). In this podcast, the third in a new 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie reflects on the pleasure, excess and the political history of hedonism.
Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at The University of Queensland, and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His research focuses on political, social and philosophical aspects of English Renaissance literature, and on the influence of Shakespeare on later writers and thinkers. He is currently working on self-control and the conflict between reason and the passions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. This paper, which was delivered at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016, discusses political understandings of nature in Shakespeare’s plays.
Laurie Johnson is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. He is the President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, and his publications include The Tain of Hamlet (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and The Wolf Man’s Burden (Cornell University Press, 2001). He is currently finishing a book on the Newington Butts playhouse and the plays performed there in 1594 by the Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This paper, ‘“The Silver Spring Where England Drinks”: Shakespeare’s Sewers and Bodily Politics’ was delivered at a conference on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. It examines the association of sewers in Shakespeare’s time with the body politic.
Valerie Traub is the Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor and Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a specialist in the study of gender and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and the author of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 1992). This paper, ‘Becoming Converted: Sex, Knowledge and the Religious Body Politic’ was delivered at a symposium on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. In the paper, she advances a queer and intersectional analysis to expand our notion of the body politic from one of state formation to one that is dynamic and takes account of embodiment.
Karin Sellberg is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She is particularly interested in feminist and queer readings of Shakespeare’s plays, and in early modern science and theories of time and embodiment. This paper, which was delivered at a symposium on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016, discusses the function of sanguinity and virility in Shakespeare’s 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear'. It argues that the health of physical as well as political bodies in the plays relied on a generative circulation of blood.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions. She is currently a DECRA Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide, and is an editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society'. In this podcast, the second in a new 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie reflects on the importance of love for determining how people live together within societies.
Paul Megna is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. He is currently researching the role of emotion role in medieval and medievalist drama. This seminar paper, 'Medievalist Existentialism and Emotional Ethics in Simone De Beauvoir's 'The Useless Mouths' (1944)' was delivered at The University of Western Australia on 25 November 2016. In the paper, Paul examines the ethical implications of decisions that are made within the play to expel parts of a fictional medieval Flemish community. He does this particularly in light of existentialist ideas about love, death, meaning, freedom and responsibility.
Katie Barclay is an historian of gender, the family, the self and emotions. She is currently a DECRA Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide, and is an editor of the journal 'Emotions: History, Culture, Society'. In this podcast, the first in a new 'Thinking with the History of Emotions' segment, Katie reflects on hope and creativity as a way of 'doing 2017 differently'.
Thomas Dixon is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include the history of emotions (especially anger), emotional health, medicine and science, and the cultural history of philosophy (including Stoicism and existentialism). He is the author of Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Paperback edition, 2006), and he is currently working on a history of anger. In November 2016, Professor Dixon visited the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions as a Partner Investigator. While in Adelaide attending the CHE Biennial Research Meeting, he was interviewed by Education and Outreach Officer Penelope Lee.
Vivasvan Soni is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. His research interests include the rise of the novel, moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing and theories of modernity. This seminar, delivered at The University of Queensland on 28 October 2016, relates to his current work on the 'crisis of judgment' in the eighteenth-century. Through a close reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment – the text through which aesthetics is constituted as an autonomous discipline – the paper argues that a certain liberal conception of freedom finds itself at odds with the practice of judgement.
Rebecca McNamara is a lecturer in medieval literature at UCLA. She studies the history of emotions related to the suicidal impulse in medieval English literature and culture, a project she began as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. This paper was delivered at a research workshop on ‘Medieval Emotions and Contemporary Methodologies’ at Birkbeck, University of London, on 8 July 2016. In the paper, Rebecca analyses her article ‘The Sorrow of Soreness: Infirmity and Suicide in Medieval England’ (Parergon 31.2 (2014), pp. 11-34) in order to unpack how she uses language as an intellectual inroad for uncovering how emotional habits and practices were established and how they evolved.
Ella Kilgallon is a doctoral student at Queen Mary, University of London. Her AHRC funded project investigates the lived and imagined spaces of female members of the Franciscan third order in thirteenth-century Italy. This paper was delivered at a research workshop on ‘Medieval Emotions and Contemporary Methodologies’ at Birkbeck, University of London, on 8 July 2016. In the paper, Ella discusses the life of Angela of Foligno, a female penitent and member of the Franciscan third order, and analyses the physicality of her emotional response upon entering two key Franciscan churches.
Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at The University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St John's College. She is the author of Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and editor, with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders, of Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). This seminar paper, 'Thinking About Feeling: Text, Emotion and Audience in Middle English Secular Literature', was delivered at The University of Western Australia on 22 November 2016. Why, how and how far, it asks, can or should we assimilate the study of literature in medieval secular texts to the 'history of emotions' approach?
Annalise Acorn is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. She works on the theory of emotions in the context of conflict and justice, and is the author of Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice (UBC Press, 2004) and a forthcoming book on resentment and responsibility. This public lecture opened a conference on 'Emotions in Legal Practice: Historical and Modern Attitudes Compared', and was delivered at The University of Sydney on 26 September 2016. In the paper, Acorn argues that criminal punishment devoid of emotions of blame is contrary to the morally robust justification for the criminal law. The lecture was jointly sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Sydney Ideas.
Emma Hutchison is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her research examines trauma and emotions in world politics, as well as how the emotional dimensions of disaster images shape humanitarian practices. This paper, delivered at a conference on ‘Emotions, Media and History: Theory and Practice’ at The University of Adelaide on 23 September 2016, investigates the development of ‘humanitarian emotions’ through images, and argues that emotions are pivotal to transforming how we think about others’ suffering.
Brenton J. Malin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies and teaches media history, theory and criticism, and is the author of Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America (NYU Press, 2014). This lecture, 'Electrifying Voices: Technology and Public Speaking in the Early Twentieth-Century United States', opened a conference on 'Emotions, History and Media: Theory and Practice' at The University of Adelaide. It was delivered on 22 September 2016, and explores how a series of technological developments in the early twentieth-century United States aided in the creation of a new model of public speech.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is Professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. She is interested in the relationship between citizenship, democracy and the media. This paper, which focuses on the ways in which anger is constructed as a collective and motivating force in political protest (and challenges to these constructions), was delivered at a conference on 'Emotions, Media and History: Theory and Practice' at The University of Adelaide on 23 September 2016.
Katie Barclay is a DECRA Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Adelaide. Her current project focuses on intimate relationships amongst the Scottish lower orders between 1660 and 1830. This paper, 'The Caring Touch of lower Order Masculinity: A Case Study of Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Scotland', was presented at a conference on the theme of 'Gender Worlds, 500-1800: New Perspectives', at The University of Western Australia on 8 October 2016.
David Matthews is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies at the University of Manchester. He delivered this keynote paper at 'Feeling (For) the Premodern', a symposium held at The University of Western Australia on 2 September 2016. In the paper, Professor Matthews examines medievalism and apprehensions of the Middle Ages in three different phases: the Renaissance to the Romantics; the Napoleonic Wars to the mid-nineteenth century; and the aftermath of Victorian medievalism.
Clare Davidson is a doctoral candidate at The University of Western Australia. On 7 June 2016, she delivered the following paper at a workshop on ‘Translating Chaucer, Chaucer as Translator’ at The University of Western Australia. In the paper, she considers medieval representations of the anatomical and spiritual effects of desire, drawing attention to our role as readers and translators of the emotional body.
Iain McCalman is a Research Professor in History at The University of Sydney, co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and an Advisory Board Member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. In this lecture, delivered at The University of Western Australia on 29 August 2016, Professor McCalman outlines why and how a small episode of elephant killing during Theodore Roosevelt’s eleven-month African Safari of 1909–1910 led to his current book-in-progress on hunting and human-animal emotions.
Carol Lansing is Professor of History at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is a specialist in the society, politics and culture of medieval Italy. On 12 February 2014, she delivered this keynote paper at a conference on ‘Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe: 1200 to the Present’ at The University of Adelaide. In the paper, she argues that accounts of abduction in late medieval Italy can be read as ritual power struggles that were carried out through displays of emotion.
Stephanie Trigg is Professor of Medieval Literature at The University of Melbourne and Director of the Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. On 14 July 2016, she delivered the 2016 Biennial Chaucer Lecture at the New Chaucer Society conference in London.
Laura M. Stevens is Associate Professor of English at The University of Tulsa, co-editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and President of the Society of Early Americanists. She delivered this keynote paper on 2 July 2016 at ‘Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100–1800’, a conference jointly organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) and the Freie Universität Berlin.
Paul Megna is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. On 7 June 2016, he delivered this paper at a workshop titled 'Chaucer as Translator/Translating Chaucer'. In the paper, he argues that Chaucer was acutely interested in exploring how fantasies of parrhesia, or frank speech, shaped subjectivity.
Monique Scheer delivered her keynote lecture entitled 'Fetishizing Emotions' at the Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 Conference at the Freie Universität Berlin on 30 June 2016. The conference was jointly organised by The Freie University Berlin and The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100-1800.
Helen Hills is Professor of Art History at the University of York. She specialises in the art and architecture of Baroque Italy. On 10 February 2014, she delivered this keynote paper at a conference on ‘Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe: 1200 to the Present’ at The University of Adelaide. In the paper, she examines the interplay between affect and religion through materiality in order to bring together material and spiritual approaches that have too often excluded each other.
Bob White is Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100–1800). On 15 April 2016, he delivered this paper at a symposium on 'Emotion, Ethics and War' at The University of Western Australia.
Ada Palmer presented this paper at the 'Afterlives of Hellenistic Ethics' symposium at The University of Queensland, on 8 April 2016. In the paper, she analyses why Pious Renaissance Humanists read and defended the Roman 'Atheist' Lucretius.
Louis C. Charland is a jointly appointed professor in the departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and a Partner Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. On 17 June 2016, he delivered this paper at a workshop on 'passion' and 'emotion' at The University of Western Australia.
This discussion paper, 'Shakespeare and the Ethics of War: International Relations and the Problem of Honour', was delivered by Dr Patrick Gray (Durham University)during a Centre for the History of Emotions seminar on 'Emotion, Ethics and War' at The University of Western Australia in April 2016.
In March 2016, Cora Fox, Associate Professor of English from Arizona State University, was interviewed by CHE Education and Outreach officer Penelope Lee on her research, methods and sources. In this podcast, she discusses her work on happiness, why she pursued this emotion over all others, and how the study of emotions has changed her research and influenced her teaching.
"The Limits of Tolerance: Arguments For and Against Religious Violence in the Middle Ages" was the second lecture in a "What's New in Medieval" series at The University of Western Australia, co-sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Institute of Advanced Studies. Delivered on 11 May 2016, it explains changing interpretations of the parable of the wheat and the tares in discussions of the use of deadly force as a response to Christian heresy.
This public lecture, the first in a 'What's New in Medieval' series co-sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, was delivered at The University of Western Australia on 18 April 2016. The lecture ranged selectively from the immediate post-medieval period to the present day, but with an emphasis on the period 1800-2000, and analysed long-term trends in the discourse of war in both high-culture and popular medievalism.
In March 2016, Professor Kathryn Temple of Georgetown University visited the Centre for the History of Emotions as a Distinguished international visitor. While primarily based at the University of Adelaide during her stay, in March she visited the University of Melbourne for a study day on 'The Heart' to deliver a paper on "Terror, Torture and Tenderness: The ‘Feeling Heart’ of English Justice". While in Melbourne, she was interviewed by education and outreach officer Penelope Lee on her research, methods and sources. In this podcast, she discusses her work on William Blackstone and English Law, the clash between reason and emotion, the interdisciplinary turn, and the role of emotions in the upcoming US election.
Listen to Michael Barbezat, Postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Western Australia interview Professor Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, about her history of emotions research. Professor Rubin is renowned for her work on the Virgin Mary.
LECTURE: Helen Ostovich delivered a lecture on Laughter in the William Shakespeare play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, at the Merry Wives of Windsor symposium at the University of Western Australia.
Listen to Philippa Maddern, inaugural Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). For medieval writers, ‘nature’ had an extraordinarily wide range of significance.
Profound generic chasms separated the manorial account roll recording in apparently passionless detail the monetary value of woodlands, fields and meadows; the medieval romance, locating knightly ‘adventure’ in highly fictionalised forests; the tract on geomancy, explaining how personal and political futures could literally be ‘read’ in the earth; or the learned encyclopaedia, encouraging readers to view the natural world either as an allegorical figure of wisdom, or as a divinely-authored ‘Book’ through which theological truths could be discovered.
Medieval environmental historians, therefore, should ideally read their material—both archaeological or textual—against its grain, and in relationship to the various genres of environmental discourse. This lecture addressed such questions as how the 12th–13th centuries (a period of heavy deforestation) developed the highly popular genre of forest romances? How and why late-medieval English writers, living in a period of apparent climatic turmoil, produced literary pictures of a static environment? And what were the connections between the perception of the natural world as a divinely-authored text, and the perception of nature as a result and testimony of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace?
This is the first of our Shakespeare 400 series, in which we join many around the world in celebrating William Shakespeare, 400 years after his death. In this podcast Professor Bob White (The University of Western Australia) discusses his latest publication, Avant Garde Hamlet.
A fascinating keynote from the Religious Materiality & Emotion' symposium, this lecture looks at how we think about agency in religious settings, how it is distributed between people’s bodies, souls, heavenly beings, and material artefacts (in a broad sense), and how this distribution is contested, including in academic discourse. Sheer argues that emotions play a special role in this process and that practice theory gives us a good framework with which to analyse it, using examples from her research among various kinds of Christians.
More information here: http://historyofemotions.org.au/events/religious-materiality-and-emotion/
Professor Charles Zika (UniMelb)
This lecture will explore some of the key emotional and visual strategies used by artists to identify witches as dangerous others.
Elizabeth Papp Kamali (University of Michigan): The Devil’s Daughter of Hell Fire: The Role of Anger in Medieval English Felony Adjudication
This paper expands upon my earlier analysis of the meaning of felony, in which I posited that the medieval paradigm of felony was an act that involved deliberation and forethought, the exercise of a person’s reasoning capacity and volition in the absence of necessity, and moral blameworthiness, sometimes rising to the level of evil. Here I grapple with the complications raised by the issue of anger. On the one hand, anger was seen to be a product of an ill-formed conscience. This potentially placed anger within the felonious area of moral blameworthiness. On the other hand, anger in its more extreme manifestations was seen to inhibit a person’s ability to reason and to inspire behavior resembling insanity, thereby possibly pointing toward a partial excuse. Relying on legal records, religious writings, and literature, this paper excavates the understandings of anger that informed jurors’ attitudes toward felony defendants.
Image: The seven bowls of God's wrath, Thesaurus Novi Testamenti elegantissimis iconibus expressus continens historias atque miracula do[mi] ni nostri Iesu ChristIcones Revelationum S Iho[anne]s Evangeliste in Pathmo, 1585, Copyright, The Trustees of the British Museum
Prof. Hans Jacob Orning talks on “Once again I’m in trouble, as I have received the wrath of my master”. Law, anger and mercy in Norwegian courts in the High Middle Ages. Orning delivered this talk at the Emotions in the Courtroom symposium presented by The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100 - 1800) and the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature, University of St Andrews at St Andrews in May 2015.
In this paper he discussed the relationship between legal procedures, religious penitence and political power in high medieval Norway, using a court trial between the Orcadian Earl Harald Maddadsson and the Norwegian King Sverre Sigurdsson from 1195 as a point of departure. This trial was one out of several in which the king summons magnates to answer for accusations of treachery or disloyalty. These processes are interesting, because they show that the legal idiom is intertwined with religious associations in terms of supplication and penitence, as well as the granting of mercy. Moreover, the traditional way of solving conflicts through mediation and compromise shines through in the agents’ understanding of such trials. In my presentation, I will define and discuss these different ways of understanding conflict, at the same time as I will underline the interconnectedness of these conceptions, demonstrating that the courtroom is indeed filled with emotions.