How did people once die from ‘nostalgia’? Why were Victorians so nervous about boredom? And why did a self-help author in the 16th Century encourage his readers to practice feeling sad? We all know that the stories we tell ourselves about our emotions influences the way we feel. But what is less recognised, is the way those stories are shaped not just by our personal circumstances, but by larger political and cultural forces.

This lecture will explore the field of the history of human emotions, and how the values and ideas associated with emotions have changed – and continue to change, across time in response to new medical, political, religious, and even economic ideas.

You should leave the lecture with a deeper understanding of the relationship between language and feeling, and the tools to investigate the pervasive and often invisible cultural assumptions about why some emotions are ‘bad’ and others desirable.

Some questions we will think about:

- Is it true that some emotions are more ‘basic’ than others?

- Does how we think about an emotion actually change the way we feel it? How?

- What influences our own emotional cultures today? How might medical theories or music trends, class or gender, shape the ways we feel?

- What scripts do we follow when we feel disgust, anger, fear, surprise, happiness or sadness? How do these expectations change across different historical eras or event from place to place?

Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions, which tells the stories of 154 feelings from around the world. It has been published in 9 countries so far. She is currently a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and she was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and London. Her most recent publication: Schadenfreude, explores the psychology of finding joy in another’s misfortune.

Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, the BBC News Magazine and The New Scientist. In 2014, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. In her previous career, she was a theatre director.

Links:

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