Seminars

Affect Studies

  • Founded
    2015
  • Seminar Number
    777

This seminar seeks to bring together scholars in the fields and subfields that have been touched by a growing interest in the emotional or affective experience, whether understood as embodied or incorporeal, emotional or impersonal, quantifiable or escaping measurement. This inter/multidisciplinary seminar on affect will incorporate a wide range of approaches and topics across disciplines and periods. We aim to provide a forum for a discussion of affect in the arts, sciences, history, psychology, philosophy, ecology, queer/feminist studies and social theory, among others, as well as a means to historicize how affect and emotion have served in religious, social, and political contexts in different periods and locales, from Antiquity to contemporary life. We feel that fostering interdisciplinary exchange on the question of affect is vital for understanding the many valences of affect studies’ vocabulary and concerns.

Co-Chairs
Professor Patricia Dailey
pdailey@columbia.edu

Professor Thomas Dodman
td2551@columbia.edu

Professor Lauren Mancia
laurenmancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Rapporteur
Alec Joyner
alj2140@columbia.edu

All seminars will meet over Zoom for the 2020-2021 academic year. Meeting links provided upon RSVP. Meeting dates and times are subject to change. 

Meeting Schedule

02/22/2021 Online Meeting
5:00 PM
Collective Emotions
Piroska Nagy, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)
Abstract

Abstract

The history of emotions, which emerged as an autonomous field of historical study between the 1980s and the millennium, surprisingly has somewhat forgotten to think about – more than to study – collective emotions in the past twenty years. This fact obliges historians both to understand the manifold reasons for this oblivion and to rectify it. While some reasons for this oversight are linked to the scientific context or to a discomfort with the concept, which will be discussed in the first part of this lecture, others are linked to the difficulties of delineating what collective emotions are or represent in historical sources and how to study them. After having presented these problems, I shall propose a few avenues, illustrated by medieval examples.
03/12/2021 Online Meeting
12:00 PM
TBA
Philip Napoli, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Liz Strong, Columbia University