As part of growing global collaboration in the history of emotions, the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions (CHE) in Australia is co-sponsoring a visit by Professor Ute Frevert, Director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Professor Frevert is visiting The University of Melbourne to participate in the ‘Emotions in International History Conference’, 15–17 December 2014 to deliver the keynote lecture, ‘Emotional Politics in International Relations: A Historical Perspective’.
Her recently published works include Emotions in history – lost and found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), two co-authored volumes: Learning How to Feel: Children’s literature and emotional socialisation, 1870-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Emotional lexicons: Continuity and change in the vocabulary of feeling 1700-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Professor Ute Frevert explains that her new book, Learning How to Feel, investigates the ways in which children and adolescents learn, not just how to express emotions that are thought to be pre-existing, but actually how to feel.
“My new book is a collection of essays from all over the world that demonstrates how children were provided with emotional learning tools through their reading matter to navigate their emotional lives.
“The series recognises the multi-faceted nature of emotions from the eighteenth century nearly to the present, exploring them through the histories of science, medicine and psychology, as well as literature, art, religion, politics and economics.
“At the Max Planck Institute for Human Development we are dedicated to researching human development and education. We have more than 13,000 publications per year in internationally renowned scientific journals and many of these are the most cited publications in their relevant field.
“The Center for the History of Emotions researches and analyses the changing norms and rules of feeling over time. We look at different societies and see how they develop and organise their emotional regimes, codes and lexicons over the modern period.
“Our work has focussed on both western and eastern societies in Europe, North America and South Asia and we examine how emotions have influenced social, political and economic developments,” she said.
In her keynote presentation at The University of Melbourne conference, Professor Frevert will investigate the politics of honour, shame and humiliation, which are all significant emotions in international relations from early modern times to at least 1945. Her lecture will tread their path through diverse structural settings from the era of early modern state-building under absolutist rule to the era of strong nationalism.
Professor Frevert is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, and between 2003 and 2007 she was Professor of German History at Yale University. Prior, she taught history at the universities of Konstanz and Bielefeld and at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include the history of emotions, social and cultural history, gender history and political history in the modern period.
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