Author Archives: helenstark

Lunchtime seminar: Eric Parisot ‘Laughing at John Damer: The Reformative Ethics of George Colman’s The Suicide, A Comedy (1778)’

QMCECS Lunchtime Seminar
in association with the Centre for the History of the Emotions

Thursday 1 December, 1-2pm:

Eric Parisot (Flinders University, Australia), ‘Laughing at John Damer: The Reformative Ethics of George Colman’s The Suicide, A Comedy (1778)’

When the Hon. John Damer—the profligate son of Lord Milton and husband to prominent socialite and sculptor Anne Damer— took his life in 1776, it sparked a number of responses in the correspondence of the bon ton, satirical poetry, fiction and drama. Horace Walpole gave a rather nonchalant description of events, replete with playful classical monikers, concluding with one of his favourite aphorisms: “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel”. In contrast, George Colman decided to test the ethics of laughing at suicide in his sentimental comedy, The Suicide (1778). Labelled “a very dangerous subject” by David Garrick, this domestic comedy raises matters of class, social obligation, and their relation to genuine nobility in tracing the self-destructive foibles of young Tobine. The paper reflects on why people might have found it appropriate to laugh about suicide in the late eighteenth century, what ethical concerns were raised by laughing at other people’s self-destruction, and indeed, why we no longer deem the topic of suicide as appropriate laughing matter.

Venue: Arts Two in room 2.17

All welcome: lunch will be provided

News round-up: Emma Sutton

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting some news round ups. Today’s is about Emma Sutton, postdoctoral fellow on ‘Living with Feeling’.

June 2016

Emma presented a paper titled ‘Hygiene, Habits and Healing: William James on Emotions and Health’ at conference on ‘Balancing the Self’ at the University of Exeter.

August 2016

Emma presented a paper titled ‘Psychological Health and Cultures of Care: A Historical Perspective’ at the Royal College of Nursing. The paper focused on Emma’s new research and explored why historical research is relevant to contemporary healthcare practices / policy.

September 2016

Emma was Medical Humanities producer on a Wellcome Trust-funded society award called ‘Surgeon X’. The comic and accompanying app have just launched (September 2016) with incredible reviews from the comic industry / critics.

Professor Thomas Dixon joins advisory board of Human Mind Project

Professor Thomas Dixon has joined the advisory board of the Human Mind Project – an interdisciplinary initiative bringing together practitioners of the sciences, arts and humanities. The project is  an initiative of  the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and  is led by neuroscientist Colin Blakemore.

Earlier this year, Thomas was one of the speakers at a Human Mind Project event in Brighton about emotion and memory. You can read more about emotion, and watch videos of some of the talks given, by Thomas and others, on the Human Mind Project website.

Evening seminar: Elizabeth Toon and Sue Ziebland

The emotional impacts of a cancer diagnosis can be many and varied. In this special event for the Being Human Festival of Humanities, we explore patient experiences of cancer, past and present.

Elizabeth Toon (University of Manchester),“A conspiracy of pretence”: learning to cope with mastectomy in twentieth-century Britain

Sue Ziebland (Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford), Healthtalk.org as an online resource for people with cancer, and their family and friends

Healthtalk.org is a website providing information and support for a range of health issues through people’s real life experiences. Thousands of people have shared their experiences on film to help others understand what it’s really like to have a health condition such as breast cancer or arthritis.

Register your place on Eventbrite

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 2.17), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

 

Lunchtime seminar: Katrina O’Loughlin and Pen Woods ‘An Encyclopaedia of Spaces and their Emotional Contents and Discontents through Time’

On Wednesday 14 December, Katrina O’Loughlin and Pen Woods will give a paper titled ‘An Encyclopaedia of Spaces and their Emotional Contents and Discontents through Time’.

Katrina O’Loughlin (Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion) and Penelope Woods (Lecturer in Drama, QMUL) present their project to inventory inhabited and imagined spaces and their emotional character in specific moments in history. These include, for instance: the boudoir, confession box, reliquary, tomb, carriage, nutshell, fan case, pocket, tea chest, ice house, dove cote, foyer, coffee house, battle ground, folly, asylum, agora, hermitage, tiring house, parliament, baths, piazza, class room, lying-in room, audience chamber, waiting room, balcony, bird cage, trunk.. each examined in the through the cultural and material history of its emergence at that time, in that place.

Early on in Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion she refers to a common sense of ‘the feeling in the room’, qualifying this with a reflection on how the individual’s relationship to that ‘sticky object’ or site of emotion will, nevertheless, vary. In 1958 Gaston Bachelard published his influential work: La poetique de l’espace, in which he considers the contours and psychic contents of domestic spaces, wardrobes, nests, shells and corners. O’Loughlin and Woods are attempting a bold project to bring current theories of emotion, and the history of emotion, together with work in continental philosophy and cultural geography on built environments, inhabited and found spaces, to curate a detailed inventory of the emotional character and effects of specific historicised spaces. O’Loughlin and Woods propose that these spaces operate as container, lens and propagator of culturally and historically specific repertoires of emotion.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided.
https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place at the Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, seebit.ly/QMcampusmap. The room will be confirmed soon.

Lunchtime seminar: David Lederer ‘Caduti in Acqua: Lifesaving and the Public Sphere in the 18th Century’

On Wednesday 7 December, David Lederer will give a paper titled ‘Caduti in Acqua: Lifesaving and the Public Sphere in the 18th Century’.

The presentation addresses the formation of humane societies across eighteenth-century Europe and North America as part of a larger project on emotional welfare entitled ‘Love thy Neighbour’, conducted under the auspices of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie IOF from the European Union. Humane societies were lifesaving organisations to save ‘apparent’ victims of drowning (a euphemism for suicides). The first, the Maatschappij tot Redding van Drenkelingen, was a private society founded in Amsterdam in 1767. The humane society put wealthy physicians and clergy squarely in the public sphere and allowed for the accumulation of social capital through philanthropy without an embarrassment of riches. Through the Republic of Letters, the idea spread quickly to virtually every major city in Europe and across the Atlantic. However, structures varied; in some places, like Dresden, the Crown assumed the prerogative of intervention on behalf of its subjects, whereas in Bologna intervention fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Structural variations notwithstanding, lifesaving manifested one of the earliest modern public health and safety policies in the service of the common weal.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/news/autumn-term-events/

The talk will take place in the Arts Two building (room 2.17), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, seebit.ly/QMcampusmap.