Monographs and Editions 2015 - 2016


Otniel Dror/ Bettina Hitzer/ Anja Laukötter/ Pilar León-Sanz (eds), History of Science and the Emotions. Special issue of Osiris, 31.1 (2016).

Otniel Dror/ Bettina Hitzer/ Anja Laukötter/ Pilar León-Sanz (eds), History of Science and the Emotions. Special issue of Osiris, 31.1 (2016).

What new insights become available for historians when "emotions" are included as an analytical category? This volume of Osiris explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dialogue between the history of emotions and the history of science leads to a rethinking of our categories of analysis, our subjects, and our periodizations.
The ten case-studies in the volume explore these possibilities and interrelationships across North America and Europe, between the twelfth and the twentieth century, in a variety of scientific disciplines. They analyze how scientific communities approached and explained the functions of emotions; how the concomitant positioning of emotions in and/or between body-mind-intersubjectivity took place; how emotions infused practices and how practices generated emotions; and, ultimately, how new and emerging identities of and criteria for emotions created new knowledge, new technologies, and new subjectivities; and vice versa.
Margrit Pernau/ Helge Jordheim/ Emmanuelle Saada/ Orit Baschkin/ Christian Bailey/ Einar Wigen/ Orit Bashkin/ Mana Kia/ Mohinder Singh/ Rochona Majumdar/ Angelika C. Messner/ Oleg Benesch/ Myongkyu Park/ Jan Ifversen, Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries. Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies—their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
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