This cluster engages scholars researching the emotional history of war, violence and conflict in any region or period.
War is a permanent feature of human experience, a focus for intense emotions, and a subject of ongoing critical public interest. Researchers in this cluster investigate the emotional forms of war, both in their relation to the nature of individual historical conflicts, and in the changing expressive and performative modes through which they have been conceived and experienced.
Cultural productions – literature, art, theatre, music, historiography, philosophy and theology – interact powerfully with the historical event of war in the creation of the emotional and cognitive resources with which lives are lived. We consider the different emotional circumstances of life within individual wars, exploring the emotions of war as historical experiences whose production and expression is bound up in changing bodily, cultural and technological practices. Tracing the ways in which cultural discourses and practices have communicated the state of war to the historical record, we investigate how the experience and cultural repertoires of emotion within war have been shaped, in order to deepen understanding of the influence of the past on the present.
Collaborating Members
Dr Audrey Calefas-Strebelle, The University of Western Australia
Dr Erin Sebo, Flinders University
Guy Windsor, The School of European Swordsmanship, UK
Cluster Activities
‘Ports and Portals: Emotions in Encounter and Exchange’ Workshop, 7–8 June 2017, Split, Croatia. Centre for the Study of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Exchange (ECCE).
‘Emotion, Ethics and War’ Workshop, 15 April 2016. CHE, The University of Western Australia.
‘Mediating War in the Early Modern World, 1600–1815' Symposium, 17–18 November 2015. Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS), The University of New South Wales, Canberra.
‘War and Emotions’ Public symposium, 17 August 2017. CHE and Centre for WA History. Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia.
‘In Form of War: Emotions and Warfare in Writing 1300-1820’ Symposium, 27–28 June 2014. CHE and Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group.
‘Chivalry’ Masterclass, 26 June 2014. The University of Western Australia.
Select Publications
Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell, eds. Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin, eds. Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Susan Broomhall and Sarah Finn, eds. Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2015.
Megan Cassidy-Welch and A. E. Lester, eds. Crusades and Memory: Rethinking Past and Present. London: Routledge, 2015.
Dr Michael Ovens, 'Masculine Identity and the Rustics of Romance'. Viator 47.1 (2015): 45–56.
David Konstan and Peter Meineck, eds, Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.
Main Outcomes
Research on Emotions and War
Individual and collaborative publishing
Workshops, symposia and conference papers and panels
Supervision and mentoring of graduate students
Public engagement activities
