The Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London invites applications from outstanding post-graduate students wishing to pursue doctoral research into aspects of the histories of emotions and health. The deadline for applications is 31 January 2017.

This studentship is offered as a core element of a Collaborative Humanities and Social Science research project funded by the Wellcome Trust. This interdisciplinary project is entitled ‘Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience’. Candidates can read more about the project at the ‘Living With Feeling’ website.

Applicants will normally have attained (or expect to attain by the end of the academic year 2016-17) a Masters qualification that will equip them to pursue doctoral research in this area. We particularly welcome applications from black and minority ethnic candidates, who are currently under-represented within QMUL at this level

The Centre for the History of the Emotions has a strong commitment to undertaking engaged research of a kind that connects with work in other disciplines and with many aspects of contemporary life, including the arts, education, healthcare, and public policy. We will especially welcome applications displaying a similar commitment.

Prior to completing an application, potential candidates should make email contact with Professor Thomas Dixon, Dr Rhodri Hayward, or Dr Elena Carrera, to establish whether a suitable supervisory team will be available.

The studentship will include tuition fees, a budget for travel and research expenses, and a starting annual stipend of £22,278. The studentship will commence in September 2017 and run for three years.

In order to apply, candidates must complete a QMUL online postgraduate research application form, indicating their interest in the Wellcome Trust ‘Living With Feeling’ studentship, and including a CV, two references, academic transcript(s), a one-page personal statement and a 1,500-word proposal detailing the ways in which they plan to address the themes of the studentship.

Further Information about the ‘Living With Feeling’ Project

In the twenty-first century ‘emotional health’ is a key goal of public policy, championed by psychologists, the NHS, charities, and economists. Those lucky enough to enjoy good ‘emotional health’ are considered less likely to suffer from a range of mental and physical disorders, such as depression, addiction, anxiety, anorexia, irritable bowel syndrome, or heart disease.

But what is the perfect recipe for emotional health? Who decides which emotions we should feel, and when, in order to be healthy? Living with Feeling will explore how scientists, doctors, philosophers, and politicians – past and present – have engaged with human emotions such as anger, worry, sadness, love, fear, and ecstasy, treating them variously as causes or symptoms of illness or health, or even as aspects of medical treatment.

The project will connect the history and philosophy of medicine and emotions with contemporary science, medical practice, phenomenology, and public policy, exploring three overlapping meanings of ‘emotional health’:

1. The emotional dimensions of the medical encounter between patients and doctors, including the experiences of those suffering from chronic conditions, and the roles of empathy and compassion within this relationship.

2. The emotional factors influencing physical and mental health, focussing on emotions as contributory factors to both illness and wellness, engaging historically with recent findings in neuroscience, immunology, psychotherapy, and public health.

3. Emotional flourishing, understood as a state of healthy balance in an individual’s emotions; including historically and politically contingent assumptions about meta-emotional capacities such as empathy, self-control, self-esteem, mindfulness, and resilience.

The team from the Centre for the History of the Emotions (QMUL) will be visiting the Centre For Victorian Studies for ‘Living With Feeling in the Nineteenth-Century‘ on Thursday the 19th January 2017 from 18.00.

In 2015 the Centre for the History of the Emotions was awarded a grant of £1.6m by the Wellcome Trust for a five-year inter-disciplinary research project entitled ‘Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience’.  The project, one of the first to receive a Wellcome Trust Humanities and Social Science Collaborative Award, will connect the history and philosophy of medicine and emotions with contemporary science, medical practice, phenomenology, and public policy, exploring the many varied and overlapping meanings of emotional health, past and present.

Professor Thomas Dixon will introduce the project and then be speaking on  anger and rage in animals and humans. Jennifer Wallis will cover Victorian psychiatry, and explore, using asylum records, how doctors and patients discussed hallucinations.  Sarah Chaney will be speaking on psychotherapy, self-control and emotion in the late Victorian asylum. Tiffany Watt Smith will be talking about laughter – in particular, the physiology of laughter and hats.

 The evening will include a seminar from each member of the team and a question and answers session followed by a wine reception in the board room opposite the Picture Gallery. 

 WHEN: Thursday, 19th January 2017 from 18.00 

 WHERE: The Picture Gallery, (Founders Building Building) – Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX 

  All students across disciplines are welcome, as well as interested staff members. It would be helpful if those planning to attend could register on EventBrite but we are happy for attendees to show up on the day without registering if this is not possible.

 For information on upcoming events (including the chance to register) please visit 

 centreforvictorianstudies.eventbrite.co.uk 

Professor Thomas Dixon  is a historian of emotions, philosophy, science, and religion at Queen Mary University of London, where he directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions. A regular contributor to radio and television programmes as an academic consultant, interviewee, and presenter, he was the consultant for Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain, a three-part BBC Two series in 2012. The author of several books and numerous articles on the history of ideas, in 2008 he was awarded the Dingle Prize (for the best book on the history of science accessible to a wide readership) for his Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, also published by Oxford University Press. In 2014, he wrote and presented a fifteen-part series, Five Hundred Years of Friendship, for BBC Radio 4.

Tiffany Watt Smith is a research fellow at the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions, and was also a 2014 BBC New Generation Thinker. Before choosing to pursue a path in academic research and writing, Dr. Watt Smith worked as a theater director for seven years, including stints as Associate director at the Arcola Theatre and International Associate Director at the Royal Court.

Sarah Chaney completed her PhD at UCL in 2013, focusing on self-inflicted injury in late nineteenth-century British asylum psychiatry. Her background is in museums and public engagement. She is a part-time project manager (public engagement) on the ‘Living with Feeling’ project, and I also run the events and exhibitions programme at the Royal College of Nursing.

Jennifer Wallis is currently Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches modules on British history and Victorian values, the history of psychiatry, and the history of the supernatural. Her main research interests are in the history of medicine and psychiatry and her first monograph, Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum, is scheduled for publication with Palgrave in 2017. At present she is working on a second book on the history of resuscitation from the nineteenth century to the present, which explores relationships between individuals, technologies, and spaces.