Colloquium: Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (OUP 2020): A conversation between the author, Francesco Buscemi, HoE, Benno Gammerl, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Hannah Malone, HoE

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially presents its winter semester 2020/2021 colloquium:

MARK SEYMOUR, UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO, NEW ZEALAND

Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (OUP 2020): A conversation between the author, Francesco Buscemi, HoE, Benno Gammerl, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Hannah Malone, HoE
The colloquium features a panel of three scholars discussing a recently published book with its New Zealand-based author. The study, which is based on the records generated by a dramatic murder trial heard in Rome in 1879, seeks to offer a new paradigm for emotions history – the ‘emotional arena’. Through a close examination of the spaces in which lives, loves, and deaths unfolded – from marital homes through secret letters to a circus and finally a Roman courtroom – the book explores the crucial role of diverse social ‘arenas’ in shaping emotional cultures. Register here

Mark Seymour is associate professor of history at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He completed a BA (Honours) in history at the University of Sydney before postgraduate research at the University of Connecticut, USA, and in Rome, Italy. After receiving his doctorate, in 2004 he moved back to the southern hemisphere to take up an academic appointment at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He has published two sole-authored monographs, several co-edited volumes, and a range of journal articles and chapters. He has been co-editor of the journal Modern Italy since 2015.
Francesco Buscemi is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin). After receiving his PhD in History at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), he was a Visiting Associate Fellow and Ermenegildo Zegna Founder’s Scholar in the Department of History at the University of Warwick (2016-2018). His research interests span a broad range of eighteenth-century topics focusing on the cultural aspects of the French Revolution and the religious culture of the Counter-revolution. His new project deals with the relations between emotions and rhetorical practices in France and Italy (1750-1861).
Benno Gammerl teaches Queer History as a DAAD lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2021 he will move on to the European University Institute in Florence as a Professor for the History of Gender and Sexuality. Gammerl’s fields of expertise include the history of homosexualities in modern Germany, the history of empires and the history of emotions. His current research project explores the interplay between migratory dynamics and attitudes towards sexual diversity in twentieth-century Europe. His book on the emotional life of gays and lesbians in West Germany since the 1950s will appear with Carl Hanser in 2021. The book’s narrative is driven by the failed marriage of a heroic but impotent soldier of Italian unification. His estranged wife began an affair with a virile circus acrobat, and the illicit lovers then murdered the unfortunate husband to make way for their own marriage. Prior to and during the trial, over one hundred witnesses – from professionals to servants to circus clowns – offered their views on matrimony, sexuality, and infidelity. Their words, and other sources, including rich newspaper coverage of the trial, provide rare peepholes into little-known areas of the social fabric, giving insight into the way emotions were experienced and expressed during this formative period in Italy’s history. As a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Hannah Malone is writing a book on grief as a political instrument in Fascist Italy. After completing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, she worked as a Rome Fellow (2013–14) at the British School at Rome, as a Research Fellow and Lecturer (2014–17) at Magdalene College Cambridge, and then as a Humboldt Fellow (2017–19) at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her first monograph is entitled Architecture, Death and Nationhood (Routledge, 2017).