Les émotions au Moyen Âge : un objet littéraire.
Appel à communication-Colloque SLLMOO 2017
Source : Fabula
Colloque international à l’Université catholique de Louvain (8-10 décembre 2016)
Entre le cœur et le diaphragme. (D)écrire les émotions dans la littérature narrative et scientifique du Moyen Âge
La codification écrite des émotions a toujours reposé sur une sorte d’aporie qui, de nos jours, est loin d’être résolue, même si la technologie numérique semble avoir trouvé une ‘solution’ dans les emoji ou emotikons (selon qu’on choisisse l’étymologie japonaise ou grecque). En 2015, l’Oxford Dictionnary a decerné le titre de « Word of the year » au ‘petit visage avec larmes de joie’ (Face with Tears of Joy emoji : ). Au-delà de l’anecdote, la pratique qui nous pousse à utiliser un double système, voire un code sémiotique hybride, confirme qu’il existe un hiatus entre la parole écrite et les réactions, sentiments, émotions qu’elle est censée refléter ou décrire.
L’histoire des émotions a connu un essor très important dans les dernières années comme en témoignent les nombreuses publications récentes ainsi que les projets de recherche en cours dans différentes universités d’Europe et des Etats-Unis – publications et projets embrassant l’histoire, la linguistique, l’anthropologie, la littérature. L’année 2015 a vu la publication de quatre importants ouvrages consacrés à l’histoire et l’écriture des émotions dans la tradition médiévale, notamment les volumes collectifs Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature et La expresión de las emociones en la lírica románica medieval, ainsi que les monographies Sensible Moyen Âge. Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval et Fisiologia della passione. Poesia d’amore e medicina da Cavalcanti a Boccaccio.
Notre colloque a l’ambition de contribuer à la réflexion en lançant le pari de croiser les approches de l’écriture scientifique et de l’écriture narrative autour de cette grande problématique. Nous sommes surtout intéressés de comprendre dans quelle mesure la littérature médicale et la littérature narrative ont pu avoir des influences réciproques dans le traitement, la description, voire l’analyse des émotions.
Voici quelques possibles pistes de recherche :
Les communications pourront embrasser à la fois les langues romanes, le latin et la tradition gréco-arabe. L’un des principaux objectifs de cette rencontre est de stimuler le dialogue entre les romanistes et les spécialistes de l’histoire des sciences, notamment de la médicine.
Les communications auront une durée d’environ 20-30 minutes.
Les propositions de communication, contenant le nom et l’affiliation institutionnelle du conférencier, accompagnées d’un résumé d’une dizaine de lignes, sont à envoyer à Grégory Clesse (gregory.clesse@uclouvain.be) avant le 15 avril 2016
Source : ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
Date: 17-18 February 2016, commencing with a public lecture on 16 February
Venue: Hosted by the Centre for the History of Emotions, The University of Adelaide at the Majestic Roof Garden Hotel, Adelaide City
Symposium organisers and enquiries: Dr Claire Walker, The University of Adelaide and Julie Hotchin, Australian National University.
Key Speakers:
Professor Monique Scheer, University of Tübingen
Professor Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London
Charles Zika, The University of Melbourne.
Materiality plays a vital role in cultivating, shaping and directing religious emotions. Pilgrimage and public ritual, private devotional practices, the use of space and settings in which religious activities take place, and bodily posture and movement all arouse, shape and direct religious feelings. The recent critical interest in the role of material culture in religion has been paralleled by the attention in emotions studies to the exploration of affective relationships between beings and things, and the role of the material in eliciting emotional responses. Yet the interplay between materiality and emotions in religion has received less attention, especially within an historical context.
This symposium will integrate these strands of research by exploring the ways in which the material – such as objects, space, the body and sensory perception – stimulated, shaped and informed the emotional dimensions of religion.
We invite abstracts for papers (20 minutes in length) that address the relationship between religion, materiality and emotion within a European context between 1200 and the present day. Papers that address the symposium theme from non-Christian traditions would be particularly welcome. Within the broader conference theme potential and welcome areas of inquiry may be, but are not limited to:
Abstracts of no more than 300 words, and a short biography, should be emailed to both Julie Hotchin, and Claire Walker by the deadline of the 31 October 2015. Questions or queries can also be addressed to the above.
Call for Papers: 31 October 2015
Notification of Acceptance: 15 November 2015
The symposium will start on the eve of Tuesday 16 February with a Public Lecture, and will run on Wednesday 17 and Thursday 18 February 2016.
A registration fee of AU$100 will include a conference pack, lunch, and morning and afternoon tea on 17 and 18 February. Postgraduate students will receive a discounted rate. There will also be a symposium dinner on 17 February. Details of the venue and cost of the dinner will be provided closer to the event.
Source : ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
Date: 30 June to 2 July 2016
Venue: Freie Universität Berlin
Professor Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History University of Oxford
Professor Monique Scheer, Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen
Professor Laura M. Stevens, Department of English, University of Tulsa
Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 is an international conference jointly sponsored by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800, with the further involvement of scholars from The Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. It will draw on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise in addressing the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods. The conference thus brings together two major areas in contemporary Humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed and performed in pre-modern contexts, both by individuals and within larger groups and communities; and the study of pre-modern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges and understandings, within Europe and between non-Europeans and Europeans.
The period 1100-1800 saw a vast expansion of cultural movement through travel and exploration, migration, mercantile and missionary activity, and colonial ventures. On pilgrimage routes to slave routes, European culture was on the move and opened up to incomers, bringing people, goods and aesthetic objects from different backgrounds into close contact, often for the first time. Individuals and societies had unprecedented opportunities for new forms of cultural encounter and conflict. One major question for the conference to consider is finding the appropriate theory and methodology that will account for the place of emotions in this varied history.
Such cross-cultural encounters took place within a context of beliefs – popular, religious and scientific – that were propagated in literary, historiographical and visual sources, with a heritage reaching back to the classical period, and with a long religious tradition. One strand of the conference will deal with the changing literary and visual cultures that mediated European understandings of African, Mediterranean and Asian peoples, practices and environments, and which reveal the image of Europe and Europeans in other regions. Literary works (travel narratives, histories, epics and romances, hagiography), theatrical performances, visual artefacts and musical compositions were highly important in forming the emotional character of cross-cultural contacts, and the nature of literary, visual and performance culture. They responded to new cultural influences and created the emotional habits and practices through which cultural understandings were received and interpreted.
The conference will also explore the role emotions played in shaping early modern and late colonial encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans. This might include the emotions embedded in missionary work and conversion, as viewed from both sides of these transactions, and in European settlements built on slavery. Evidence is provided by the accounts of participants, in the records of European and colonial government sponsoring and regulating their populations, in personal correspondence, and also in the associated visual and material record, including maps and ethnographic illustrations, propaganda and other responses by indigenous subjects.
Tracing emotional cultural movements also invites consideration of the variety of spaces – ships, villages, churches, courts, rituals and dreams – in which cultural movements and contacts occurred, and emotive responses to environmental features. This might also include the emotional responses of non-Europeans who found themselves in European environments.
More generally, the conference will consider the affective strategies of early modern Europeans in the acquisition, exchange and display of colonial objects. What emotional transformations did objects undergo in their passage across Europe and between European and other societies? What was the role of emotions in the formation of early ethnographic texts and collections, and in the museum culture of early modern Europe?
This last question leads to the issue of retrospective emotions, as observers in modernity look back on the long history of cross-cultural contact and write its course. How have their desires and emotional projections influenced understanding and reception?
Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 will extend over two-and-a-half days, including three plenary sessions by distinguished invited speakers, several Round Table discussion groups, and numerous panels consisting of three 20 minute papers plus discussion. One or more refereed publications of essays based on proceedings are expected.
For individual paper proposals, individuals should submit a paper title, abstract (c. 250 words), your name, brief biography (no more than 100 words), institutional affiliation and status and contact details. For panel proposals, the organiser of the panel should submit the same information for each of the three speakers, and the name of the person to chair the panel. Please send the proposals to Ms Francisca Hoyer (FU Berlin) and Ms Pam Bond (CHE) by 31 October, 2015.
Un appel à contribution pour un numéro de “Carnets de géographes” qui sera consacré aux émotions.
Source : fabula
CfP Emotional and Affective Narratives in pre-Modern Europe/ Late-Medieval and Renaissance France
In contemporary thought, the field of emotion studies represents a very potent framework that allows anthropologists, historians, neuroscientists and philosophers to think of the possible ways in which subjects engage with their own sensory experience and with larger practices that enable them to articulate such experiences in in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, “How do I feel?” is a question that was equally quintessential in the pre-modern Western system of thought even if the contemporary significations of the word “emotion ” did not become concrete until the 17th century. In their attempt to capture pre-modern emotional modes and systems of feelings, contemporary medievalists, especially under the influence of poststructuralism, considered emotions primarily as discursive entities that shape collective and individual subjectivities.
Barbara Rosenwein’s influential notion of “emotional communities,” which inaugurates this trajectory in medieval studies, turns away from the Cartesian split between mind and body and, instead, presents emotions as discursive regimes consisting of strategies, tactics and the conscious ways in which subjects engage with these. However, while emotions are indeed discursive cultural constructs producing collective subjectivities they also possess a sensorial aspect that simultaneously escapes being captured by the social while being constitutive of it. This was the special contribution of the affective “turn” in contemporary theory: the epistemological need to distinguish between emotions as discursive constructs, and affects as flashes of sensory experience and feelings.
This volume aims at complicating Rosenwein’s existing notion of emotion as discursive practice and, at the same time, investigating how medieval subjects talked about their somatic, sensorial and affective practices. If emotions belong to the complexities of social dynamics, we ask how are they incorporated in textual artifacts and cultural productions stemming from often conflicting social events, groups and discourses? How do they act as facilitators between the author and its audience, between the period and its meaning, between the genre and its writing? The emotional and affective dimension of a text cannot be rationalized as either its objective or its point of origin. It is more a textual and factual paradigm around which the author develops her intellectual environment, creating the cultural and political dimension for the text. However, it is within this territory of the text, as a socio-cultural entity orchestrated by the auctorial persona, that a whole archive of emotions and affects is disseminated.
We are interested in essays that investigate the constituency of such “archives of feelings” (Cvetkovich) through the study of the affectivity and emotionality of both literary and non-literary texts, such as political and theological treatises, mystical texts, medical works, scientific tracts and pamphlets, hagiographies and encyclopedic compendiums. While we welcome submissions of articles dealing with such topics in different geographic areas, we are particularly interested in late-medieval and Renaissance French texts.
Articles may examine, but are not limited to questions related to:
– Discourses and practices of emotions and affect
– Somatization of the emotional act
– Affect and emotions in poetry
– Emotions, affect and gender
– Queer emotions and affects
– Emotions, affect and race
– Psychogeographies of emotions and affect
– Rhetorics of affect or emotions
– Emotional rewritings of historical events
Please send 300-word abstracts in English, as well as a short biography with university affiliation and email address, to Andreea Marculescu (marculescu.andreea@gmail.com or amarcule@uci.edu) and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (cmorandm@uvm.edu) before June 1st. Selected abstracts will be notified on July 1st, and the complete papers will be due on November 1st.
Passions of War is the name of a new international research network, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The Network brings together EU and international participants, representing a range of academic disciplines and professional backgrounds, to investigate the influence of war, from the early modern period to the end of the Second World War, on constructions of gender and sexual practices, and how these constructions and practices have, in turn, conditioned the ways in which wars are waged, mediated, felt and understood.
A distinguishing feature of the Network will be the re-examination of standard accounts of war, gender and sexuality in the light of alternative, emergent and marginalised histories, with a particular emphasis on histories of emotions.
Four workshops will take place between June 2015 and October 2116, focussing on ‘Identities’ (Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent), ‘Intimacies’ and ‘Spaces’ (University of Leicester) and ‘Resistances’ (National Army Museum, London).
Research findings from the four workshops will be discussed with museum practitioners from the Dr. Guislain Museum and the National Army Museum. It is one of the project’s objectives to engage and inform audiences beyond academia through input into museum displays, as well as through a weekly blog and educational resources.
The Network is a co-operation between the English Department at the Leicester University, the Group for Early Modern Studies at Ghent University, the National Army Museum in London and the Museum Dr. Guislain (Ghent). The AHRC awarded the network grant to Prof. Philip Shaw (Principal Investigator, University of Leicester) and Dr. Cornelis van der Haven (Co-Investigator, Ghent University).
For further information about the Network please contact Prof. Philip Shaw: ps14@le.ac.uk.
Object Emotions, Revisited: An Interdisciplinary Conference
(February 20-21, 2015, New Haven, CT)
Keynote speaker: Spyros Papapetros (Princeton U)
Organizing Committee: Padma Maitland (UC Berkeley); Christopher P. Miller (UC Berkeley); Marta Figlerowicz (Yale U); Ksenia Sidorenko (Yale U); Emma Natalya Stein (Yale U)
“Object Emotions” continues a critical dialogue about new directions in humanities research and theory that began at UC Berkeley in 2013. This conference is inspired by the recent heightened attention to objects and emotions as new points of entry into history, literature, art, architecture, area studies, and the social sciences. We aim to foster interdisciplinary reflections about the critical uses of thing theory, affect theory, the histories of emotions, and new materialism. We also want to study how these discourses might benefit from being set in conversation with each other.
Last year, these questions inspired papers on, among many other topics, forms of animism in fourteenth-century England, the role of tiles in Taiwanese architecture, representations of churches in Willa Cather, oral accounts of labor in factories in India, and the songs of Kylie Minogue. This coming conference seeks to be similarly diverse and experimental in the kinds of approaches it brings together. By exploring emotions and objects in conjunction with each other we hope to bring out the shared stakes of these scopes of critical inquiry, as well as the divergences among the ways feelings and things are studied in particular disciplines.
Questions we want to ask include, but are not limited to, the following: How is the task of describing emotions within the context of a poem different from describing them within the context of a painting, a cathedral, or temple? How do the current fields of affect theory, thing theory, and the history of emotions participate in the much longer history of debates about the subjective and the objective? How do emotions and the bodies experiencing them relate to each other? Are there cultural differences in the way objects and emotions are defined and assessed? What does it mean to attribute feelings to an inanimate object, or even to describe this object as the cause or inspiration of a feeling? Do feelings have an animating force? How does the critical framing of scale—the microscopic, the individual, the human, the social, the global—change the way we pursue questions about objects and emotions?
The conference will take place at Yale on February 20th and 21st, 2015. Participants will include both graduate students and faculty members. We welcome papers that address any of the questions described above, or related ones, with reference to the bodies of theory shared across disciplines or to individual works of literature, art, or architecture. Please submit 250-word abstracts to Padma Maitland at padmamaitland@berkeley.edu by November 15, 2014.
Source : Alain Faure
Congrès de l’Association Française de Science Politiques – Aix en Provence 2015 (http://www.afsp.msh-paris.fr/)
Section Thématique n°8 – Pour une politique des émotions (http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/200/files/2014/06/appel-AFSP-Aix-ST8.pdf)
Dans différentes controverses académiques internationales en sciences sociales, on observe depuis une décennie une même tendance à la réévaluation de la place des émotions et des sentiments dans les travaux empiriques et dans les schémas explicatifs (en histoire avec l’hypothèse d’un affect turn mais aussi en géographie -l’émotivité de la vie socio-spatiale-, en philosophie -le désir dans la formation des idées et l’équipement politique des passions-, en neuroscience -les sources de la conscience et le libre arbitre-, en psychosociologie, en psychanalyse…). Coté science politique, Philippe Braud a exploré la voie sur les élections puis a progressivement élargi le spectre jusqu’à ses travaux récents sur la colère des foules et sur les engagements affectifs et moraux à long terme, impulsant des recherches fécondes sur des objets aussi divers que la démocratie, les violences, le pouvoir ou les identités (Sommeiller Crettiez 2012). La mise à l’épreuve des émotions fait dorénavant l’objet de recherches spécifiques dans le champ politique, à l’image par exemple des études menées sur les mobilisations collectives par Christophe Traïni et de George Marcus sur le citoyen sentimental, des travaux de sociologie sur la dimension passionnelle du pouvoir, des essais de psychologie sur les révoltes, des recherches historiographiques sur la violence des échanges en milieu parlementaire…
Cette effervescence nous semble particulièrement propice à la tenue d’une section thématique de l’AFSP questionnant la façon dont les émotions influent, orientent et parfois même structurent les comportements et les faits politiques. Au vu de la grande hétérogénéité de méthodes et de concepts mobilisés dans ces travaux, nous souhaitons ouvrir une « boite de dialogue » pour relier ces champs de connaissance spécialisés ou méconnus, pour dresser un bilan sur les différentes traditions intellectuelles en présence et pour engager un exercice prospectif sur de potentielles convergences et innovations intellectuelles. A titre indicatif, trois pistes sont suggérées. La première, la socialisation politique des individus, concerne le repérage des empreintes émotives individuelles qui éclairent, a posteriori, des engagements forts dans l’action politique (qu’il s’agisse de traumatismes familiaux, d’épreuves personnelles, d’évènements marquants, de rencontres décisives, de contextes culturels saillants ou même de sentiers de dépendance aux institutions locales). Une deuxième piste, les passions exprimées dans la pratique du pouvoir, permet de revisiter différentes séquences qui marquent, par leur intensité émotive, le parcours et le métier des élites politiques. On pense aux ressorts personnalisés de l’éligibilité mais aussi à la dramaturgie des campagnes et des défaites électorales, aux affrontements et compromis dans les arènes politiques, aux pactes scellés au cœur des forums de politiques publiques. Une troisième piste enfin, la production des grands récits sur le bien commun, concerne l’ensemble des pratiques discursives et narratives qui donnent aux émotions une place stratégique de réenchantement politique, que ce soit dans le champ plutôt sectoriel (et catégoriel) des mobilisations et des doctrines professionnelles, dans celui plus spatialisé (et identitaire) des stéréotypes territoriaux, ou encore dans celui plus idéologique (et emphatique) des discours sur la défense de l’intérêt général. La focale des champs explorés se veut résolument ouverte (le personnel et les discours politiques, les controverses dans l’analyse des politiques publiques, la représentation et le comportement électoral…) et la section thématique s’intéressera indistinctement à différents moments politiques (la prise du pouvoir, la présentation de soi, les contestations, les alertes, les scènes délibératives…). La seule consigne adressée aux communicants concerne l’exposé du cadrage théorique et des passerelles rendues possibles ou souhaitables entre différentes traditions analytiques. Même si l’hypothèse d’un emotional turn est loin d’être validée dans les champs de la science politique et de la sociologie politique, la section thématique se fixe pour objectif d’amorcer un travail collectif à la fois introspectif et exploratoire dans le monde des émotions qui interfèrent avec la politique.
Sur le plan pratique, il est demandé aux auteurs d’envoyer une proposition de 3 000 signes maximum (espaces compris) avant le 15 octobre 2014 présentant le projet de communication et un bref CV. Les thèses en cours, les projets à plusieurs voix, les essais pluridisciplinaires et les contributions de collègues étrangers (en anglais ou en français) seront particulièrement bienvenus.
Appel à contribution – Senses and sensuality in the Middle Ages
Barcelona, 20-22 May 2015
All this was shewde by thre partes, that is to sey by bodyly syght, and by worde formyde in my vnderstondyng, and by goostcly syght.
The rose’s red hue, its intoxicating scent and its thorns show us the many faces of this flower’s truth. Senses are the ways through which humans interact with the world and develop their life learning.
For its connection to pleasure and joy, senses have been dually interpreted as sources of sin and immorality yet also as paths of knowledge, since through them we can reach a universe of perceptions which encourage experimentation and thus, relation with our surroundings and with our inner self. Julian of Norwich, an English theologian and mystic, expressed with simplicity in the words cited above how she had knowledge of the divine: three types of visions connected to different senses.
In this new researchers’ encounter we seek to open the door to the multiples insights and reflections about senses and sensuality in the Middle Ages, offering a wide range of aspects linked to the multiple narratives which this issue inspires: the ways of knowledge, sensory and spiritual pleasure, or artistic and literary forms which have captured the sensorial universe in the Middle Ages.
With a distinctly interdisciplinary intention, the congress aims to give voice to innovative researches on multiple and corresponding fields, such as History, Philosophy, History of Art or Philology, among others. Our main objective with this call is to help build new spaces of creation and of transmission of knowledge, thus confronting the specialization and compartmentalization of expertises usually attributed to the academic world. The accepted papers will define the final sections in which the congress will be divided.
Call for papers
Proposals will be accepted until October 31st 2014. You can send your texts in a word or OpenDocument text format, to the address arditcongress2015@gmail.com. You will receive an acceptance/refusal answer from the scientific committee before November 30th.
Abstracts extension: maximum 300 words.
Key words: maximum 5 concepts.
Languages accepted: The congress’ official languages are Catalan, Spanish and English. Likewise, we welcome proposals in French, Italian and Portuguese as well. Selected presentations in any Romanic language should include an English presentation (*ppt) or a handout in English including a summary of the content.
Personal details required:
Name and surname.
Institution.
Title of the paper or poster.
Contact details: email, phone number (optional).
Inscription price for participants: 25 euros (free of charge for ARDIT members).
Lecture timing:
Papers: 20 minutes
Posters: 5 minutes
Publication:
One of the main aims of our meeting is to spread the scientific results of the congress, publishing a selection of the best contributions. We will propose to ways of publication, as we did in the past edition of the congress:
Spaces of Knowledge: Four Dimensions of Medieval Thought (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, in press).
SVMMA. Revista de Cultures Medievals, N. 3, primavera 2014 (Institut de Recerca en Cultures Medievals Universitat de Barcelona). [link to journal]
Organizing Committee
ARDIT Medieval Cultures Coordinator: Carme Muntaner
Contact details
arditcongress2015@gmail.com
http://arditculturesmedievals.weebly.com
Information related to the accommodation in Barcelona and other useful information coming soon on ArditCongress’ website: http://arditcongress.weebly.com
With the support of:
Institut de Recerca en Cultures Medievals (IRCVM)
Màster en Cultures Medievals de la Universitat de Barcelona Societat Catalana de Filosofia (filial of Institut d’Estudis Catalans)
Criminal Law and Emotions in European Legal Cultures: From 16th Century to the Present
21-22 MAY 2015
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
KEYNOTES
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt University)
David Sabean (UCLA)
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Dagmar Ellerbrock (MPIB/TU Dresden)
Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt University)
Legal institutions and jurists have often perceived themselves and promoted an image of their role and activity as essentially ‘rational’. Yet, emotions have always been integral to the law, particularly in the case of criminal law. Emotions were and are taken explicitly or implicitly into consideration in legal debates, in law-making, in the codified norms and in their application, especially in relation to paramount categories such as free will, individual responsibility and culpability, or the aggravating and mitigating circumstances of a crime. Emotions could directly or indirectly play a role in defining what conduct was legally relevant, worthy of legal protection or in need of legal proscription; in why and how it was necessary to punish, and what feelings punishment was meant to evoke.
Legal scholars in the past did not shun the complex relationship between law and emotions. Yet it is in the last two decades that specialists from different disciplines, from law theory to psychology, from philosophy to history, have shown an increasing and lively interest in unravelling the role played by passions, feelings and sentiments in criminal law. Special attention has been focused on three key areas: norms, practices and people.
This two-day conference seeks to historicize the relationship between law and emotions, focusing on the period from the sixteenth century to the present. It aims to ask how legal definitions, categorizations and judgments were influenced by, and themselves influenced, moral and social codes; religious and ideological norms; scientific and medical expertise; and perceptions of the body, gender, age, social status. By examining the period between the sixteenth century and the present day, this conference also seeks to challenge and problematize the demarcation between the early modern and the modern period, looking at patterns and
continuities, as well as points of fissure and change, in the relationship between law and emotions. In particular, it seeks to question the extent to which ideas about law and emotions fundamentally shifted around the eighteenth century—the traditional marker of the ‘modern’ period.
This conference will explore how legal professionals, as judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and other legal officials, handled different forms of knowledge about emotions in the practice of law, in accordance with, or in opposition to, general social and cultural attitudes and public opinion. It will further investigate the presence and absence—and their meanings—of emotions in the courtroom, as a fundamental aspect of criminal law practices. It will take into consideration not only the emotions which were shown, expected and provoked but also the ones which were repressed, controlled or proscribed by different legal actors and the public. Finally it will also include analysis of how legal understandings of emotions were portrayed in the media and in the wider society.
We invite submissions from scholars of different historical disciplines, working on early modern and modern periods and particularly encourage proposals from scholars working on Northern, Central and Eastern European countries, and the non-Western world.
The conference will be held in English.
Accommodation and travel expenses for those presenting will be covered by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
If you are interested in participating in this conference, please send us a proposal of no more than 300 words and a short CV by 1 October 2014 to cfp-emotions@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes, in order to allow time for questions and discussion.
Dr. Laura Kounine, Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin
Dr. Gian Marco Vidor, Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin
Dr Erin Sullivan, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, e.sullivan@bham.ac.uk
Dr Kristine Steenbergh, VU University of Amsterdam, k.steenbergh@vu.nl
This seminar focuses on the importance of emotion in Shakespeare’s plays and poems and their significance within various European contexts. Acknowledging that emotion can be both culturally and historically contingent, as well as something shared across different cultures and communities, this seminar is interested in searching out the fault-lines of Shakespeare’s emotional registers and understanding their power to transcend different kinds of European boundaries, as well as reinforce them.
Papers in this seminar might take a historical approach, considering, for instance, how Shakespeare’s works participated in scholastic debates about the relationship between emotion and the body, the rhetoric of emotion, the role of emotion in politics and governance, or the ethics of emotion. They might in turn consider how religious change across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped Shakespeare’s representation of emotion and its place within spiritual devotion, personal piety, and holy ritual.
Other participants may choose to take a different approach, using literary readings or performance-based analyses to consider how emotion in Shakespeare has been interpreted more recently by European readers, philosophers, directors, actors, and audiences. Such papers might focus, for instance, on the role emotion has played in themacting styles developed by famous practitioners such as Stanislavski, Brecht, or Laban, and the subsequent effect this has had on Shakespearean performance, or on how particular emotions have been generated within the context of European national theatres, Shakespeare festivals, and other performance venues.
Whatever their preferred approach, participants in the seminar are invited to consider the extent to which emotion is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic craft, and whether or not it is a constant, or at least translatable, feature across different European cultures and communities. To what extent does emotion in Shakespeare bring European readers, performers, and audiences together, and to what extent does push them apart?
If you’re interested please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief biography (150 words) by 1 December 2014 to both me and Kristine. All participants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals by 1 March 2015, and the deadline for submitting the completed seminar papers (3,000 words) will be 1 May 2015.
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EMOTIONAL BODIES A Workshop on the Historical Performativity of Emotions
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20-22 October, 2014 Louis Jeantet Auditorium Geneva, Switzerland
Dolores Martin Moruno – IEH2, University of Geneva Sophie Milquet – Department of French Modern Studies, University of Lausanne Beatriz Pichel – PHRC, de Montfort University
Deadline: 1st July, 2014
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CALL FOR PAPERS
The idea that the body is the site in which emotions are expressed is an old one in Western Culture. We manifest fear through trembling, embarrassment while blushing or demonstrate love by showing that the pulse quickens and breathing becomes irregular. However, we cannot take for granted the existence of a natural relationship between emotions and these bodily translations. For instance, while the passions were considered in the Early Modern period to be the expression of the movements of the soul, as well as powerful agents shaping bodies in health and disease, late nineteenth century and early twentieth century physiologists and psychologists would discover that the material body was an effect of “the immediate and local emotions produced in the laboratory” (Dror, 1998). From this historical perspective, the relationships between bodies and emotions seem to be far from being universal, as they are also socially and institutionally produced in specific historical contexts.
This three-day workshop seeks to challenge the idea that emotions invariably correspond to certain bodily expressions, by showing that they can alternatively be understood as cultural practices that have the affective power of transforming reality by creating emotional bodies. On the one hand, bodies will be interpreted as an expressive medium that allows us to “negotiate the boundaries and crossings of self and society” (Porter, 2001). These malleable boundaries of the body will be understood in connection with the changing meaning of social norms, cultural codes and institutions, but especially as the result of the work of emotions. On the other, we propose the understanding of emotions as cultural practices that do things. This performativity of emotions has been stressed by scholars working on the history of the French revolution (Reddy, 1997; 2001), the history of medicine (Bound-Alberti, 2006), political theory (Ahmed, 2004) and literary theory (Labanyi, 2010) as one of the most fruitful lines of research in emotion history.
Taking the metaphor of the body as starting point, this conference aims at discussing new possibilities to enhancing our understanding of the historical performativity of emotions as agents that have generated meaning to physical, social, political, artistic and literary bodies. Therefore, the expression “emotional bodies” may be regarded as an analytical category enabling us to explore how different historical conceptions of emotions (e.g. sentiments, passions, affects and feelings), as well as the practices and objects associated with them, had produced systems of symbolic and physical relations which we understood here as “bodies” with a multidisciplinary purpose. We invite scholars working in any historical period to focus on one of the following topics; each of them related to the creation of scientific, socio-political and artistic bodies.
Producing emotional bodies in the sciences. Observation, experimentation and diagnosis have been historically used as techniques of scientific standardisation for defining the body in love, pain or pleasure. For instance, passions have been identified since Aristotle as powerful agents shaping human and animal physiognomies. Particularly, the body in love has been defined by determining the state of the pulse and the redness of countenance in Ancient medicine or through its twentieth-century conceptualisation in terms of hormone adrenaline and excitement. In which ways have scientific practices normalized emotional expressions throughout history? Have scientists’ emotions affected their work in hospitals or laboratories? How have emotions of non-speaking bodies such as those of infants and animals been scientifically categorized? Have scientific approaches on emotions penetrated into popular culture through novels, theatre, photography or film? We are looking for proposals that can contribute to shedding light on what extent the scientific production of emotions has shaped bodies that are recognisable in everyday life.
Emotions as sites for social exchange and political change. From the politics of fear examined by Joanna Bourke, to Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu and Christian Delaporte’s analysis of indignation and Sara Ahmed’s study on happiness, the collective dimension of emotions has been stressed as a potential site for social activism and political change. Is there any connection between the emergence of emotional styles and the production of the revolutionary bodies? What kind of materials and sources do we need to explore in order to reconstruct the emotions of the crowd? Has the performance of different emotions contributed to defining new bodies such as those of the feminist, anti-racist and queer movements? In this panel, we would like to address the question about the possibility of creating new social and political bodies through the performance of collective emotions.
The affective power of literature, photography and film. Scholars working in literary and photographic studies have claimed an affective turn in order to look at texts and cultural productions from the point of view of what they can do, rather than what they mean (Labanyi, 2010; Edwards, 2012; Bouju and Gefen, 2012). Thus, for example, a great number of novels, photographs and films of war have mobilised our empathy towards a humanitarian sensibility (Taithe, 2006). It was not long ago that Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! reminded us that emotions could also be a call for social and political action. How we should understand the performativity of aesthetic emotions? What role have they played in the creation of broader emotional regimes (e.g. mobilization of empathy, compassion or pity in the actual rise of the victim figure)? Can books, photographs or works of art be considered as “affective objects” produced by our sensory, haptic engagements with them? We encourage scholars interested in discussing the affective power of literary texts, photographic and film documents or artistic creations to present a proposal exploring the ways in which these objects can be interpreted as emotional bodies.
If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please send us a proposal of no more than 300 words for a 20 minutes presentation to emotionalbodies@gmail.com by the 1st, July 2014.
