HIST 3015 - Emotion in Historical Perspective

How we feel and what counts as an emotion changes across time and geographical space. This course introduces students to the history of emotions, highlighting how our emotional worlds, how we feel and show our feelings, what language we use to express emotion, and the social acceptability of particular emotional expressions, have changed over time. Students will encounter some of the key concepts or approaches used by historians to understand how emotions worked in the past, and a range of examples from the medieval to the modern and across the world that highlight the diversity of emotional experience. Key issues that can be explored by students include how emotions are involved in national identity and the making of communities; how emotions are shaped by gender or within families; how the media uses emotion to shape public opinion; and the role of emotion in legal practices and the creation of justice. More generally, we will consider how emotions make history. Through lectures, workshops and structured learning activities, students will have the opportunity to try out some of key history of emotion concepts by applying them to original historical sources. In learning about the past, students might also come to better understand the operation of emotion in the present. This is an interdisciplinary course and may appeal to students interested in emotion in psychology, biology, anthropology, literature and philosophy, as well as history.