The History of Emotions and Experience, Lectures

This course introduces students to the development and expansion of the history of emotions, its theories and methods, and its practical achievements and findings. It also looks at its relationship to the history of the senses and the potential for its turn towards a new history of experience. Class time is built around the collective reading and interpretation of a range of primary sources – visual, material, textual – which we shall work on together to give an introductory sense of what it is involved in this kind of historical research. Context for these discussions will be provided by recorded lectures, weekly readings and classroom framing. The recorded lectures chart the development of the perceived need for a history of emotions in the Annales school and its later development by American historians in the 1980s and 1990s. Against a background of interdisciplinary criticism concerning dominant strands of psychological research that promoted the idea of core affects, basic emotions, and human universality, the lectures explore the explosion of historical work on emotions since 2000 and the role of this work in making historiography a critical agent in the production of emotion knowledge, or, more broadly, in documenting the changes over time of what it has meant to be human. Class time will focus specifically on the practical applications of this work: how to ‘read’ an emotional object; how to historicise emotional language; how to decode and contextualise historical facial expressions.