This course introduces students to the development and expansion of the history of emotions, its theories and methods, and its practical achievements and findings. It also looks at its relationship to the history of the senses and the potential for its turn towards a new history of experience. Beginning with the Annales school, this course charts the development of the perceived need for a history of emotions and follows its later development by American historians in the 1980s and 1990s. Against a background of interdisciplinary criticism concerning dominant strands of psychological research that promoted the idea of core affects, basic emotions, and human universality, we will explore the explosion of historical work on emotions since 2000 and the role of this work in making historiography a critical agent in the production of emotion knowledge, or, more broadly, in documenting the changes over time of what it has meant to be human. The course is thematic, dealing each week with an aspect of methodology or interpretation, foregrounding a range of primary sources from antiquity to the recent past, in order to show how the history of emotions can be done, and what is at stake when we do it.
