On May 24, Javier Moscoso (Spanish National Research Council) will give a paper titled ‘Ambition: symptoms and treatments during the early 19th century’

Abstract

This presentation wants to contribute a small chapter to the general history of the human passions. My aims are triple: first, I would like to touch on the cultural significance of ambition during the early 19th century, understanding ambition as both a dangerous sentiment and a pathological passion. Secondly, I would like to call your attention on some of the physical and moral treatments of ambition that were explicitly or implicitly considered at the time. These will take us to explore some of the remedies prescribed in the institutions for the mentally ill, of course, but also in many other environments. Since ambition was thought to lie at the very core of recent political events, the French Restoration produced a very significant number of treatises that included very often recommendations to avoid, regulate, or restrain immoderate passionate states. From treatises on military life to tourist guides, I would like to explain not only the cultural forms in which certain bodily changes could be felt, expressed, repressed or conceptualised, but the way in which those same emotions and passions could shed some light on wider cultural phenomena.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. Read about other events we are holding this term.

The talk will take place in room 6.02, Graduate Centre, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

Please note the change in room and date from original advertisements. 

On March 1, Susanna Dowrick (Queen Mary, University of London) will give a paper titled‘”Making yourself emotionally available is a different type of work”: The emotional labour of addressing domestic abuse in primary care’

Abstract:

Health professionals are increasingly called upon as important actors in improving the response to domestic abuse (García-Moreno et al., 2014, Home Office, 2016). While there is an impetus change practice, relatively little attention has been paid to what providing better care to patients experiencing abuse entails for health professionals.

Using data from 12 interviews with GPs and observations of training sessions, this paper draws on theories of practice to explore what it is that GPs do when they undertake the work of the Identification and Referral to Improve Safety (IRIS) programme (Feder et al., 2011), looking closely at what is involved in identifying, referring and providing ongoing care to patients who have been affected by abuse. I apply Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotional labour to investigate the emotion-work that GPs do to elicit and respond to disclosures.

This research extends the existing study of emotional labour into the sphere of primary care, and presents theories of practice as an alternative lens to understand the implementation of complex interventions. Taking emotional labour to be a key part of enacting new practices offers additional considerations for those seeking to make addressing domestic abuse a sustainable part of everyday practice for health professionals.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. Read about other events we are holding this term.

The talk will take place in room 2.18, Arts Two Building, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

On March 1 Fay Bound Alberti will give a paper titled ‘Face transplants: history, ethics and emotion’.

Abstract:

Isabelle Dinoire, the world’s first face transplant recipient died in April 2016, just eleven years after the procedure that brought her unwanted fame and media attention. More than thirty face transplants have taken place around the world since 2005. While recent medical debates centre primarily on such concerns as immunosuppressant use and the appropriate age of recipients, the emotional and psychological history of face transplants, and their meanings for personal and social identity have been relatively neglected. This paper explores the recorded experiences of Isabelle Dinoire and the gendered cultural and ethical frameworks through which we might situate the history of the human face transplant.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. Read about other events we are holding this term.

The talk will take place in room 2.18, Arts Two Building, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

On January 25, Mark Condos (Queen Mary University of London) will give a paper titled ‘Colonial anxieties and the making of British power in India.’

This talk will explore what may be called the ‘dark underside’ of the ideologies that sustained the British Raj. I will argue that the British in India were obsessed with a fearfulness and an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers, and that these enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled executive power placed in the hands of district officers.

All talks are free, booking not needed. Lunch will be provided. Read about other events we are holding this term.

The talk will take place in room 3.17, Arts Two Building, Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.

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

The next QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions Work in Progress Seminar will take place at 1pm on Wednesday 23 March at Queen Mary University of London.

All welcome, lunch will be provided. Please book for catering purposes on emotions@qmul.ac.uk

 Wednesday 23 March, 1pm (Arts Two: Room 3.16)

Sarah Marks (University of Cambridge) Was there a Communist psychiatry in Cold War Eastern Europe?

 Until very recently, much of the academic literature to address the psy-disciplines in Communist Eastern Europe has reduced the story to one of three possible narratives. Firstly, the satellite states were cut off from international developments and subject to top-down imposition of dogmatic Pavlovian doctrines from Moscow, which stifled freedom and arrested scientific developments (Roger Smith, 1998; 2013). Secondly, the Communist Party elites bluntly abused the institutional power of psychiatry for punitive purposes (Bloch and Reddaway, 1984; Van Voren, 2010). Thirdly, the psy-disciplines did not have a significant role to play under Communism because such ‘technologies of the self’ are forms of governmentality found specifically in liberal democracies, and thus psychotherapeutic knowledge and practices were only likely to emerge after the fall of the Berlin Wall, once the transition to Western models of democratic governance had begun (Nikolas Rose, 1992). All three are, to an extent, Cold War mythologies, based on very limited use of primary source material, which have obscured the rich and varied ways in which the psy-professions theorized and treated mental disorder in the region. This paper will draw together cases from my own archival research on East Germany and Czechoslovakia, in comparison with the findings of contributors to Psychiatry in Communist Europe (Savelli and Marks, 2015), to discuss the ways in which Communism did – and did not – shape psychiatric research and practice behind the Iron Curtain.

Lunch is available from 12.45, and the lecture starts at 1pm.

Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. For directions and a campus map, see http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/

In 1925, Virginia Woolf reviewed Arthur Waley’s translation of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, a Japanese classic supposedly written around 1000. The second chapter of Murasaki’s novel reveals to the reader her aesthetics and aesthetic of novel-writing, which, I would like to suggest, appealed to Woolf’s pacifism, feminism and aesthetics and encouraged her to explore her own themes and Modernist method of writing. Lady Murasaki’s aesthetic sensibilities were shared by her contemporary and rival, Sei Shonagon, well known for her masterpiece, The Pillow-Book, part of which Waley translated in 1927. Theirs could be summarized as heightened sensibilities which perceive the exquisite in the trivial or the ordinary. The attitude to discover things that matter in the seemingly trivial and common, poetic prose style, keen sensibilities and pictorial descriptions conscious of colour scheme—these characteristics are something in common between the two female Japanese authors, although Lady Murasaki’s characteristics lie in her sense of “a(h)ware” —an impassioned response to beauty—whereas Sei Shonagon’s in her sense of “(w)okashi”—an intellectual response to beauty.

The two authoresses’ aesthetics or approach to beauty is subjective, and I would like to suggest that it is, in nature, close to what Walter Pater termed as “strangeness in beauty” and “sweet strangeness,” and, therefore, something that Woolf as well as other Western readers can identify. My presentation is an attempt to introduce to the audience the aesthetics and sensibilities which the two terms—aw(h)re and (w)okashi—represent, to clarify the connection between Woolf’s and the two Japanese authoresses’ sensibilities, aesthetic and aesthetics, and to throw light on the development of Woolf’s Modernist aesthetics and method.

Dr Paul White, University of Cambridge

Professor Peter Stearns, George Mason University

Dr Otniel Dror, Hebrew University of Jerusalem