History of Emotions

Do emotions have a history? Do they themselves make history? These are the questions that the Research Center on the “History of Emotions” seeks to answer. Founded in 2008, the center’s historians explore the emotional orders of the past in close collaboration with psychologists, specialists in education, anthropologists, sociologists, musicologists, literary scholars, and art historians. Our research rests on the assumption that emotions—which is to say, feelings and their expressions—are shaped by culture and learned and habituated in social contexts. Social norms and rules condition what somebody can and may feel and show in a given situation towards certain people or things. Thus, emotions are historically variable and open to change.

A central objective of the Research Center is to analyze shifting norms and rules of feeling. We consider how societies both European and non-European have developed and organized their emotional practices, styles, and lexicons. Our research concentrates on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and engages with institutions like the family, law, religion, military, and state, which exert a decisive influence on emotional regimes.   

Equally important to the Center’s research is the power of emotions to motivate action. Our historians thus study the ways in which emotions are and have been manipulated and instrumentalized in political and economic contexts and in private and public life.

Who appealed to what kind of emotions for what reasons? To what degree did emotions play a part in the formation and dissolution of social groups, communities, and movements? These and other questions guide the Center’s research and its efforts to thoroughly historicize a crucial element of human development and investigate its specific manifestations in different times and places.