E-Newsletter

 
From the Director and Deputy Director

Launch of the new Australian Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions (ACHE).

The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions officially comes to an end at the end of the year. While the transition from a fully-funded Centre to an impecunious one, with a global pandemic thrown in the mix, had its ups and downs, the past four years have seen a significant expansion of CHE’s research focus as well as an increase in our wealth of scholarly connections around the world. One benefit of the continuation of the Centre after its ARC-funded phase was that we were able to track the continuation of research outputs by people associated with CHE. To get an idea of what CHE researchers accomplished (and to signal the continuation of CHE’s impact), we might look at the final report for the single year of 2021, which reveals that CHE-associated researchers published: 13 monographs, 18 edited collections, 7 journal special issues, 57 journal articles, and 82 book chapters. If we extrapolate these numbers across the four years after ARC funding (not a precise measurement, but to get a rough idea), scholars associated with CHE probably published something approximating: 50 monographs, 80 edited collections, 30 journal special issues, over 200 journal articles, and over 300 book chapters. 

These are extraordinary numbers and, again, they represent what happened after the funded life of the Centre. The Centre during its funded phase had already produced an extraordinary volume of research—to say nothing of related grants, of public-facing events and of pedagogical developments. Charting the research published by CHE researchers after the funded phase reveals just how much momentum was built up during the seven years of CHE’s proper ARC tenure, and how important the Centre was for consolidating the history of emotions as an inextricable mode of humanities research. And while CHE is formally coming to an end, much more is yet to come.

Very excitingly, we have been working on the transition to being the Australian Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions (ACHE). With the formation of ACHE, both the brand and the node structure of the CHE will cease and we shall move to a national society format, where one committee facilitates research and outreach. Our goal will be to promote research on the History of Emotions in Australia and we shall work each year to facilitate seminars and events targeting an Australian audience, while also feeding into international events. We already have an international visitor, Hannah Yoken, and some speakers lined up for 2023. We currently have a draft constitution and are working on transitioning the website and resources to the new format. Early next year, we shall put out a call for a committee and organise our plans for 2023 and beyond. A key early event will be hosting the SHE biennial conference at Adelaide in November 2022–23. We welcome ideas for events, speakers and other activities, and as our goal is to facilitate research, please do approach us if we can help facilitate research and related activities in this area. We’d like to thank everyone reading this for their continued collaboration, and we look forward to more in the future.

To contact the Australian Chapter for the Society for the History of Emotions (ACHE) in 2023 please email: ThinkEmotions@Gmail.com. A new website is under construction, and details will be circulated in the new year.

Kirk Essary, CHE Director
Katie Barclay, CHE Deputy Director