Kolloquium: The Emotional Specimen: Darwin, Duchenne, and the Science of Expression

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2017 colloquium.

Paul White, University of Cambridge

The Emotional Specimen: Darwin, Duchenne, and the Science of Expression

This talk comes out of a larger project on Darwin and the evolution of emotion. It explores the different methods and technologies used to objectify emotional states by Darwin and the French physician Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, especially electro-physiology, natural historical observation, and studio photography. How was emotion within the observational setting manipulated? How were feeling subjects converted into emotional objects? What models of emotion underlay this conversion? And finally, what are the implications of the science of expression for emotional experience?

Paul White works on the Darwin Correspondence Project and teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Thomas Huxley: Making the „Man of Science“(Cambridge 2003) and many articles on Victorian science, literature, and culture. He has jointly edited 15 volumes of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, and is currently writing a book titled Darwin Wept: The Evolution of Emotion.