1. Emotions in History: A booming field
Research Centers (Berlin, Sydney, Queen Mary, …)
Book Series with Oxford University Press, Palgrave, …
Conferences, Journals… to be trendy, you have to talk about feelings these days.

2. Questions to ask:
Do Emotions have a history? Is there a history of love, of fear, of hatred?
How do emotions shape history? What role do emotions play for social, cultural, political history etc.?

3. Why a History of Emotions now?
Longing for hard facts in the post 9/11 world?
Dissatisfaction with cultural relativism?
Prominence of emotions in other field (neurosciences; biology of feelings)

4. Theoretical Approaches
Numerous theoretical and conceptual articles and books.
Fewer empirical studies, though they begin to appear.

5. Feeling Rules and Emotional Norms
Peter and Carol Stearns; Arlie Hochschildt
Social and cultural expectations of appropriate feelings (for boys, girls, workers, elites, etc.)
Only social norms, not the reality of feelings

6. Emotives, Emotional Regimes, Emotional Liberty
William Reddy, The Navigation of Felings
Emotives: Speech acts that verbalize emotions and thereby shape them.
Emotional Regime: Social and cultural norms that determine what can be said

7. Emotives, Emotional Regimes, Emotional Liberty
Emotional Regimes (equal to political regimes) can be more or less liberal, allowing for more or less feelings
A way to politically judge societies: the more liberal, the better
Not just about social norms, but about how people really feel

8. Emotional Communities & Emotional Styles
Emotional Communities (Barbara Rosenwein, Medievalists)
Not just one national emotonal regime, but a community (e.g. of monks) with shared emotional standards

9. Emotional Communities & Emotional Styles
Emotional Styles (Benno Gammerl, Historian of Homosexualities)
Different emotional styles, depending on the social and spatial context (different emotional styles in a football stadium and in a lecture hall)
Importance of space

10. Emotional Practices
Monique Scheer, History and Theory (2013), influential article
What people do in order to have feelings.
There are only the practices, not feelings independent of practices

11. Emotional Practices
Not just about social norms, but about what people do
Directs attention to different forms of practices, from speech acts to bodily practices
Trying out Feelings

12. Subjetivities and Emotions
Question of Subjectivity: What is the self, and how is it historically constituted?
How people shape themselves – bodily, mentally and emotionally (e.g. through therapies)

13. Fields and Applications
Histories of a Specific Feeling (Love, Fear …)
How have cultural norms regarding love changed? Where and how could love be expressed? What did people to create (and maintain) a sense of intimacy?

14. Fields and Applications
Example: History of Fear in the Federal Republic (Frank Biess, German ed. 2019, English ed. 2020)
Studying (political, medical) fears that shape politics in a society

15. Fields and Applications
Emotions at work: Do feelings at work play a role? How did (and do) companies try to make employees feel good at work?
History of Emotions as part of a general social and political history

16. Fields and Applications
Emotions and Politics
How emotions become an object of (critical) politics
Example: Feelings and urban space; does a particular form of urbanity create certain feelings?

17. Sources
Obvious sources: guide books (for teenagers, e.g.), therapeutical literature, ego-documents (diaries, letters, etc.)
Visual sources
Not only self-evident sources: court documents, management literature, military documents, …

18. Challenges? What can we actually know about feelings?
What can a history of emotions conribute to large questions?
Is a question of emotions a central question of the present?