Welcome

On this website you can learn about ourmembers, current and pastevents, and the aims of our research projects into the politics of passion, the experience of emotion, and theories of feeling past and present. Our current major research focus is two grants: ‘Living with Feeling’, awarded by Wellcome Trust in 2015; and ‘Pathologies of Solitude‘, awarded by Wellcome Trust in 2017. For regular lively discussions relating to all aspects of the history of emotions, see theHistory of Emotions andPathologies of Solitudes blogs , and check out our new interactive website,The Emotions Lab.

You can also listen to our most recent podcast series, ‘The Sound of Anger‘, winner of two awards at theBritish Podcast Awards 2020. Centre members have also contributed to a range of radio and television programmes: a selection of our recent appearances can be accessed here.

About the Centre

The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, launched in November 2008, is the first research centre in the UK dedicated to the history of the emotions. One of its key objectives is to provide a focus for interactions between social and cultural historians of the emotions on the one hand, and historians of science and medicine on the other. It also seeks to contribute both to policy debates and to popular understandings of all aspects of the history of emotions.

The activities of the Centre relate to research themes such as:

Theoretical categories: passions, affections, sentiments, feelings, emotions
The idea of expression: using the emotional body to read the emotional mind
Madness: passions and pathology in medicine and psychiatry
Well-being: happiness, public health, and emotions as political objects
Difference: how have emotions associated with different races, sexes, and sexual orientations been experienced, categorised, and controlled?
Religion: religious practices and regimes of emotion
Law: the definition, control, and punishment of passions and emotions

To join the conversation, please contact us on emotions@qmul.ac.uk.

To be added to the History of Emotions email list run by the Centre, please visit theJISCmail homepage for the list to sign up.

To discover more about the history of emotions around the world, you could visit the websites of theAustralian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions and theCentre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, and the other projects and blogs listed onour links page.

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News

Invitation: Pedagogy, Psychotherapy and Creative Practice in Twentieth-Century France: Comparative Perspectives

Please join us for an exciting event co-hosted by the QMUL Comparative Literature and Modern Languages Research Seminar and The Centre for the History of Emotions:

12.30–14.00, Thursday 4^th April, 2024 (lunch provided)

in Geography 126, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS(see maphere)

Encompassing discussion of figures whose trajectories traversed the domains of psychiatry, pedagogy and the arts in twentieth-century France — including Jean Dubuffet, Élise and Célestin Freinet, François Tosquelles and Frantz Fanon — the two papers will explore how interactions across these fields generated new conceptions of creative expression and collective life.

By delineating the historical, political and aesthetic circumstances that determined these exchanges between education, psychotherapy and the arts, the session invites discussion around disciplinary innovation in the contemporary moment.

All are very welcome! For catering purposes, please register for the event here:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pedagogy-psychotherapy-and-creative-practice-in-twentieth-century-france-tickets-838499042207?aff=oddtdtcreator

Professor Jean Duffy ‘From psychiatrist to pedagogue, patient to pupil: Jean Dubuffet’s catalytic encounters with theory and practice’ (The University of Edinburgh)

Dr Richard Mason ‘Traits d’union: institutional psychotherapy, emancipatory pedagogy and the collective stakes of learning to read and write’ (Queen Mary University London)

Chaired by Professor Kiera Vaclavik, Director of the Centre for Childhood Cultures (QMUL)

Jean Duffy is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on the nouveau roman, on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and on ritual, image, and artefact in contemporary French fiction. Her most recent book,Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer (2021), contextualizes Jean Dubuffet’s work within contemporary developments in phenomenology and examines the central role played by questions relating to embodiment in the evolution of his aesthetic thinking and artistic practice. She is currently preparing a second monograph on Dubuffet which will focus on his creative writings.

Richard Mason is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University London. His research looks at conceptual exchanges between the domains of literature and education, primarily in French and francophone contexts. He is currently working on two projects: one on the relationship between learning to read and write and institutional and collective life in twentieth-century France; the second on the status of ‘education’ in Marcel Proust’sA la recherche du temps perdu. Recently he has co-edited, with Kasia Mika, a special issue of the critical theory journalParagraph, entitledDifficulty’s Knots: Disturbance, Untimeliness, Risk(March 2024), which looks at conceptions of difficulty across education and the arts and humanities.

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