Author Archives: julesevans

New book: ‘The Smile Revolution in 18th century Paris’, by Colin Jones

51mxDsUYv6L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_The Centre is proud to announce a new book by Professor Colin Jones: ‘The Smile Revolution in 18th century Paris’.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the smile has no history; it has always been the same. However, just as different cultures in our own day have different rules about smiling, so did different societies in the past. In fact, amazing as it might seem, it was only in late eighteenth century France that western civilization discovered the art of the smile. In the ‘Old Regime of Teeth’ which prevailed in western Europe until then, smiling was quite literally frowned upon. Individuals were fatalistic about tooth loss, and their open mouths would often have been visually repulsive. Rules of conduct dating back to Antiquity disapproved of the opening of the mouth to express feelings in most social situations. Open and unrestrained smiling was associated with the impolite lower orders.

In late eighteenth-century Paris, however, these age-old conventions changed, reflecting broader transformations in the way people expressed their feelings. This allowed the emergence of the modern smile par excellence: the open-mouthed smile which, while highlighting physical beauty and expressing individual identity, revealed white teeth. It was a transformation linked to changing patterns of politeness, new ideals of sensibility, shifts in styles of self-presentation – and, not least, the emergence of scientific dentistry. These changes seemed to usher in a revolution, a revolution in smiling. Yet if the French revolutionaries initially went about their business with a smile on their faces, the Reign of Terror soon wiped it off. Only in the twentieth century would the white-tooth smile re-emerge as an accepted model of self-presentation.

In this entertaining, absorbing, and highly original work of cultural history, Colin Jones ranges from the history of art, literature, and culture to the history of science, medicine, and dentistry, to tell a unique and untold story about a facial expression at the heart of western civilization.

In Memoriam: Philippa Maddern

For all of us working on the history of emotions, around the world, the achievements of 2014 were tinged with sadness after the death, in June, of Professor Philippa Maddern, the founding director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Many friends and colleagues were moved to record their thoughts and recollections of Philippa in an online book of condolences.

One of the numerous ways in which Philippa’s contributions to the field will continue to be felt is through the work of a new journal – Ceræ: An Australasian Journal Of Medieval And Early Modern Studies – which was launched in 2014 with an inaugural volume on ‘Emotions in History’. The editorial committee of Ceræ published their own collective tribute to Philippa, recalling the time and energy she devoted to supporting and mentoring them in their new initiative.

Tiffany Watt-Smith picked as BBC New Generation Thinker

The Centre’s Tiffany Watt-Smith has been picked as one of this year’s BBC New Generation Thinkers.

The New Generation Thinkers scheme is a nationwide search for early-careers researchers who are passionate about communicating to the public. The scheme allows scholars the chance to develop their own Radio 3 programmes based on their research, and to appear regularly on air.

Tiffany Watt-Smith researches the cultural history of our compulsion to imitate each other’s expressions and gestures. She is particularly interested in the history of human emotions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

She says: “I’m delighted to have been selected to take part in this AHRC-BBC initiative, and it’s a great privilege to be part of QMUL’s tradition of engaging with the wider public. To me, ‘impact’ isn’t a one-way conversation. It’s not just about sending ideas out into the world. Engaging with other perspectives and ways of thinking can also spark off new ideas, enlivening my own research too.”

In June, the New Generation Thinkers will make their debut appearance on Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking and make regular contributions throughout 2014.

They will deliver talks at Radio 3’s annual Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage, Gateshead, in November 2014.

The NGTs will also have an opportunity to develop their ideas for television, including working with BBC Arts to make short taster films to be shown on BBC Arts Online.

This year, the New Generation Thinkers have been announced at the Hay Festival. The BBC has a three-year partnership with Hay Festival. There will be unprecedented BBC coverage on TV, radio and online, making the Festival more accessible than ever before.

You can hear Tiffany’s Radio 3 broadcast on shellshock and neurosis in the aftermath of the First World War here .

Lunchtime seminars 2014

15th JANUARY 2014
Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (University of East London)

Joy Devotion: A Year of Trash, Trinkets, and Tributes at the Ian Curtis Memorial Stone

For her doctoral research, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike captured images of the fans, flowers, and fauna every month over the course of a year at the grave of Joy Division frontman and lyricist, Ian Curtis. In this talk she will discuss how these ever-changing homages to the singer can provide unique insights into music, community, and memory.

This seminar takes place in the Francis Bancroft building, room 3.15.

26th FEBRUARY 2014
Chris Milnes (Birkbeck, University of London)

Pleasure, Medical Recovery, and ‘Euphoria’

This seminar will consider the complex relationship between pleasure, medical recovery and the word ‘euphoria’ in the history of European medicine. Prior to the late 18th century there appeared to have been an assumption that pleasure in the sick could sometimes be interpreted as a sign of medical recovery or health. The pleasure that was understood to accompany ongoing sickness or deteriorating health was usually constructed as singularly intense, creating a clear and recognisable distinction between the spectrum of pleasures associated with medical recovery and health and the singular intensity associated with ongoing sickness or deteriorating health. As a result of developments from the late 18th century onwards, however, it became clearer that a variety of pleasures of variable intensities could be experienced by both people recovering their health, enjoying good health, still experiencing sickness and also experiencing deterioration in health. The meaning of pleasure, its promise of the occasional moment of clarity within the mysterious realms of disease and otherness and health and sameness, became less reliable. This seminar will examine this phenomenon as it appears to have emerged in the 19th century and it will identify parallels between this history and the evolving meaning of the word euphoria, a word that by the close of the 19th century had taken on the ability to both console and trouble the people who used it.

This seminar takes place in the Francis Bancroft building, room 3.15.

19th MARCH 2014
Juan Zaragoza (Queen Mary, University of London)

Places to care, places to heal: Building ‘caring spaces’ in the late 19th century

Bram Stoker, the then almost unknown author of Dracula, published an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle in July 1907. Stoker went to Doyle’s house in Hindhead where, he noted:

“From where I sat the whole of the lovely valley, at the very head of which the house stands, lay before me. Due south it falls away, spreading wider as it goes, till its lines are lost in distance, an endless sea of greenery. Far away there are ranges of hills piling up, one behind the other, in undulations of varying blue. Even the whole sweep of the horizon visible from our altitude is like a wavy sea.”

A fairy tale-like vista. No wonder that Hindhead was known as ‘the English Switzerland’. The similarities went beyond landscape, and that was what had attracted Doyle: “If we could have ordered Nature to construct a spot for us we could not have hit upon anything more perfect”. But, perfect for what? Doyle elaborated in the same letter to his mother: “its height, its dryness, its sandy soil, its fir trees, and its shelter from all bitter winds present the conditions which all agree to be best in the treatment of phthisis.”

Arthur’s wife had phthisis and Hindhead’s landscape and weather conditions were like those in Switzerland, where they had spent much time from 1894 to 1896, all the while missing England and London’s literary social life. In 1895, after speaking with Grant Allen – fellow author and a consumptive himself – Arthur set about constructing his own therapeutic landscape:

“I rushed down to Hindhead … [where] I bought an admirable plot of ground, put the architectural work into the hands of my old friend [Henry] Ball of Southsea, and saw the builder chosen and everything in train before leaving England. If Egypt was a success, we should have a roof of our own to which to return. The thought of it brought renewed hope to the sufferer.”

Arthur’s house at Hindhead was built to actively take care of his wife. That is, it was a caring space. My questions are: is that possible? There could be places actually taking care of someone? And, if so, how should they be? Arthur Conan Doyle’s story will help us to illuminate some of these issues.

This seminar takes place in the Senior Common Room, Arts Two.

7th MAY 2014
Kirsty Martin (University of Exeter)

‘We must make happiness’: Virginia Woolf, Creativity and Contentment in the Early 20th Century

The paper takes as its starting point Woolf’s statement in her 1940 essay ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ that in order to create peace in the future, ‘We must make happiness’. It explores the idea of ‘making happiness’ in Woolf’s work, with a particular emphasis on Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937). It also aims to show how Woolf’s work was shaped by broader concerns relating to post-war reconstruction – especially thinking about attempts to re-construct well-being – and arguments for the importance of ‘public happiness’ made by physicians, economists and psychologists. It suggests how Woolf’s work might complicate ongoing thinking about increasing national happiness. With current research into happiness across politics, economics and philosophy, and with politicians including David Cameron suggesting that as well as increasing GDP we need to increase national happiness, the topic of well-being is prevalent in public discourse. This paper will suggest that Woolf’s work provides a way of understanding such concerns, and that she complicates arguments both for and against attempts to increase national happiness. Her work suggests strongly that ‘making happiness’ might always be allied with the fictional, always involving an element of make-believe, always needing to be crafted into existence.

This seminar takes place in the Senior Common Room, Arts Two.

4th JUNE 2014
Matthew Klugman (Victoria University, Australia)

A New Mania? Tracing the Emergence of Passionate Modern Spectator Sport Cultures in Manchester, Melbourne and Boston

The mid to late 19th century saw the emergence of intense experiences, expressions and communities of emotion that fuelled the rise of institutions of immense social, cultural and economic power – modern spectator sports. Discussion of the followers of these sports was characterised by intimations of excess and pathology typified by references to ‘mania’, ‘fever’ and ‘madness’. Yet while the social history of sports like Association football, baseball and Australian Rules football has been studied in some detail, these new, often disconcerting cultures of passion that they engendered have been neglected. This paper will use the emergence of modern sports followers to create a place for exchanges between the histories of emotion, sport, urban centres, medicine and “civic” religions. At issue are questions of new and old pleasures and suffering, the intense visceral dimensions of these, the links and cross-over between different forms of mass entertainment and popular culture, and the way mere games could come to seem ‘more important than the fate of nations’ to those who followed them.

All seminars begin at 1pm and lunch is provided. Seminars are scheduled to finish at 2pm but participants are welcome to stay and extend discussion beyond that time if they wish.

To reserve your place, please email emotions@qmul.ac.uk.

New book: ‘The Last Asylum’, by Barbara Taylor

getimageThe Centre is proud to announce the publication of a new book by Barbara Taylor: ‘The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Time.’

The Last Asylum is Barbara Taylor’s journey through mental illness and the psychiatric health care system.

The book begins with Barbara Taylor’s visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London — a picture of luxury and repose. But this is the former site of one of England’s most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney Hatch. At its peak this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients — among them, in the 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself.

The Last Asylum is Taylor’s powerful account of her battle with mental illness, set inside the wider story of the end of the UK asylum system.

Barbara Taylor’s previous books include an award-winning study of nineteenth-century socialist feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem; an intellectual biography of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; and On Kindness, a defence of fellow feeling co-written with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. She is a longstanding editor of the leading history journal, History Workshop Journal, and a director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. She teaches history and English at Queen Mary University of London.

New book: ‘Emotions and Health 1200 – 1700’, edited by Elena Carrera