Events
Past Events
Wednesday 21st March, 2012
6pm, G.O Jones room 602
URBAN EMOTIONS: A SYMPOSIUM ON STRESS AND THE CITY
The city has long been held up as a kind of psychopathological miasma. From the urban hypochondria identified by George Cheyne in The English Malady (1733) through to the theories of alienation and anomie advanced by Emile Durkheim, Walter Benjamin and Louis Wirth, the speed and stress of city life is seen as exhausting psychological resources and undermining mental health. In 2011 Canadian and German neuroscientists claimed to have demonstrated the overstimulation of the amygdala in city dwellers led to long term changes brain function. In this workshop organised by the Queen Mary City Centre and the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Felicity Callard, James Mansell and Edmund Ramsden interrogate the apparent connections between urbanism and psychopathology and considered the theories and techniques that have been deployed to make these forces visible.
James Mansell (Nottingham), ”Londonitis’: Noise and Nervousness in Early Twentieth-Century London’
What was the relationship between the experience of urban noise and popular constructions of ‘nervousness’ in early twentieth-century culture? Organisations such as the Anti-Noise League (established in 1933) took it for granted that noise was the cause of ‘nervous exhaustion’ in London’s population (a condition labelled ‘Londonitis’ by medical writer Edwin Ash) and successfully lobbied for all kinds of new legislation to control the urban soundscape. Emerging between somatic and psychological explanations for nervous illness, the early twentieth-century medicalisation of urban noise relied upon a hybridisation of the two. This paper examined popular psychological writings in order to explain why noise, often as a metaphor for modernity itself, came to be considered such a significant threat to twentieth-century urbanism.
Edmund Ramsden (Manchester), Coping with the “whirl of the crowd”: Animal models and model cities in the twentieth century United States.
The study of population dynamics by animal ecologists and ethologists helped generate considerable interest in the problem of crowding stress among social and medical scientists and the design and planning professions. Most notable were a series of experiments on rats and mice carried out by John B. Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1956-1986. In 1962, Calhoun published a particularly influential paper that identified a series of “social pathologies” that resulted from increased population density, such as violence, withdrawal and sexual deviance. The paper explored how Calhoun’s work was used to express fears of, and solutions for, the damaging effects of the American city on social behaviour and psychosocial wellbeing. However, in spite of its influence, Calhoun’s rats also served as a focal point for growing opposition to the attempts to resolve urban problems regarding mental health and social deviancy through the planning and design of physical spaces.
Felicity Callard (MPIWG, Berlin and Durham), Where did the city go? Donald Klein, panic disorder, and the rethinking of agoraphobia
When agoraphobia emerged as a named condition in the early 1870s, discussions regarding its phenomenology and aetiology intimately engaged the question of urban modernity. Both in pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic formulations of agoraphobia, for example, the spatial form of the city – its architecture, its socio-spatial relations, its materialization of a ‘public sphere’ – were central to accounts of what agoraphobia was, whence it arose, and how it might be combated. But after the Second World War, psychiatrists and psychologists’ investigations of agoraphobic anxiety tended to result in the city falling away as a central analytical term. In various models that attempted to account for pathological anxiety that limited individuals’ ability to move freely in their daily lives, the city appeared as a kind of backdrop – if it appeared at all. In this paper, I addressed the formulations of the American psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist Donald Klein, whose influential research on panic disorder (which he started in the 1950s and continues to this day) exemplifies this turn away from the city. His conceptualizations of pathological anxiety served to install a very different model of the articulation between subject, pathological emotion and socio-spatial word, a model that has had – through its consolidation in American psychiatric nosology – a significant influence on today’s Anglo-American discourses concerning anxiety and public space.
Thursday 8th March, 2012
8.30pm, Arts 2
Screening of Bhavesh Hindocha’s ‘Embodied Emotions’ Documentary Film
You can watch the film here.
This was one of a series of events as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Embodied Emotions’ project.
See also:
Embodied Emotions AHRC webpage.
Embodied Emotions leaflet [PDF]
Feeling Differently’ Report by Thomas Dixon [PDF}
Thursday 1st March, 2012
1pm, Arts 2
‘The study of beliefs and emotions in early modern Sweden through graves’, with Jenny Nyberg
Jenny Nyberg, MA in archaeology, BA in History, is an associate research student at the Centre of the History and Emotions, usually based at Stockholm University as a PhD Candidate in archaeology. Her research investigates beliefs, emotions and attitudes towards death in early modern Sweden (ca AD 1500-1800) by studying the material remains of acts performed during the burial ritual.
Wednesday 22nd February, 2012
6pm, Arts 2
‘Queering the History of Marriage: the Reception of a Castrato Husband in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, by Helen Berry
‘Queering the History of Marriage: the Reception of a Castrato Husband in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, by Helen Berry (Newcastle)
Joint event with QM Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.
Wednesday 1st February, 2012
1pm, Arts 2
‘Public Passion’, by Rebecca Kingston
‘Whether in the reception of rousing political oratory like that of de Gaulle or Martin Luther King or in the motivations of demonstrators in popular uprisings like those in Tunisia and Egypt, there is no denying that emotion and politics are connected. Nonetheless, criticism of political debate and discourse as emotionally (rather than rationally) based is ubiquitous and emotion is often presented as a negative factor in politics. Public Passion shows that reason and emotion are not mutually exclusive and restores the legitimacy of shared emotion in political life. Public Passion traces the role of emotion in political thought from its prominence in classical sources, through its resuscitation by Montesquieu, to the present moment. Combining intellectual history, philosophy, and political theory, Rebecca Kingston develops a sophisticated account of collective emotion that demonstrates how popular sentiment is compatible with debate, pluralism, and individual agency and shows how emotion shapes the tone of interactions among citizens. She also analyzes the ways in which emotions are shared and transmitted among citizens of a particular regime, paying particular attention to the connection between political institutions and the psychological dispositions that they foster. Public Passion presents illuminating new ways to appreciate the forms of popular will and reveals that emotional understanding by citizens may in fact be the very basis through which a commitment to principles of justice can be sustained.’
Thursday 15th December, 2011
1pm, Arts 2
Roundtable: Jews and Emotions
In this seminar, Miri Rubin and Daniel Wildman address the vexed relationship between emotionality, anti-Semitism and visual culture from both early modern and twentieth-century perspectives. Their presentations will be followed by a round-table discussion on the theoretical and methodological challenges raised by this field, chaired by Thomas Dixon.
Wednesday 23rd November, 2011
1pm, Arts 2
‘Emotions and privacy in the early modern city’, by Camilla Schjerning
Camilla Schjerning, (University of Copenhagen): Through the lens of court cases, this paper explores the role of emotions in the experience, expression and negotiation of the boundaries of privacy and private space in late 18th century Copenhagen.
For further information see: Lunchtime Seminars (2011)
Friday 11th November, 2011
9am, Arts 2
Wandering Feelings: The Transmission of Emotion in the Long Nineteenth Century
The Centre for the History of the Emotions and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies jointly hosts a one-day research colloquium on the theme of emotional transmission in the long nineteenth century.
Wednesday 19th October, 2011
1pm, Arts One, Room 1.28
‘Emotion and the Hospital’, by Juan Zaragoza
Juan Zaragoza, (Institute of Philosophy – Madrid), explores how material cultural studies could be helpful for historians in the study of the emotions, drawing on an exploration of the emotional experience of incurable patients in 19th Century Spain.
For further information see: Lunchtime Seminars (2011)
Wednesday 12th October, 2011
6pm, Bart's Pathology Museum
Barts Pathology Museum Seminars
October-December 2011
You are invited to attend a unique series of seminars that promise both fascinating insights into a diverse range of topics in medical history, and also a glimpse into a little known London museum. Housed within the grounds of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital at West Smithfield, the museum holds a broad range of pathological specimens, some of which date from the late 1700s, and the papers programmed all speak in some way to this collection, as well as to each other. We hope you will able to join us for what promises to be a stimulating series of conversations.
Events are on Wednesdays and start at 5.30pm (doors open from 5pm) and end at 7.00pm unless otherwise stated. Wine and nibbles provided. For further information see: Barts Pathology Events [PDF]
14 December
David Ross (The Army Health Unit, Camberley) will present on public health and the military and Professor Edgar Jones (Kings College London) will speak on shell-shock and its representation in film.
12 October
Documentary filmmaker and producer Phil Stein will show excerpts from and speak on the making of Meet the Elephant Man(2010)
19 October – 6pm start, 7.30pm finish
Professor Tilli Tansey (Queen Mary) and Professor Brian Hurwitz (King College London) speaking on medical narratives and museum voices
9 November
Philip Ball (University of Cambridge) and a medical artist will speak on the history of medical illustration and their current practice
16 November
Dr Keir Waddington (Cardiff University) will speak on ‘Dying Scientifically: Gothic Romances and London’s Teaching Hospitals’. Dr Sam Alberti (The Royal College of Surgeon) and Dr Fay Bound Alberti (Queen Mary) will present on ‘Body Parts in Bart’s’
23 November
Dr Carmen Mangion and Dr Louise Hide from the Birkbeck Pain Project will speak on ‘Rhetorics of Pain in Nineteenth-Century Convent Necrologies’ be speaking on ‘Pain and Neurosyphilis’
30 November
Professor Sharon Ruston (University of Salford) will speak on ‘Shelly and Davy and the Bart’s Medical Archive’ and Professor Iwan Rhys Morus (University of Aberystwyth) will present on ‘Frankenstein and Vitality’