History of Emotions in the Modern Period
The relatively new specialization of the history of the emotions has revealed that emotion, felt experience, and expression have played a key role in culture, society, and politics. In the history of science, however, interest in the emotions has been more muted.
This special issue will focus on the exploration of emotion theory and practice in the human sciences in the modern period — roughly from the late 18th century to today.
This special issue will address the following themes, among others.
Was there a particular historical moment in which interest in emotions in the sciences, broadly construed, increased?
While some historians situate heightened study of the emotions in the sciences in the 1960s, others point to a surge in interest in emotions after World War II.
But we can also go back to William James’s 1884 influential theory of emotion that stimulated intense debate; or to the 1910s, when Walter Cannon experimented on the physiological concomitants of emotion; or to the early 1920s, when unorthodox psychoanalysts Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank raised emotional understanding to a central place in psychoanalysis.