Emotions Make History

A conversation between Dr Rob Boddice and Macquarie University student Emma Skapetis for the Society for the History of Emotions.

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.