![\"\"](\"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/09\/Rob-Boddice-Image.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nHuman brain activation due to voluntary action. Credit:\u00a0Parashkev Nachev<\/a>.\u00a0CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n
Rob Boddice (Freie Universitaet Berlin and McGill University, Montreal) will give a paper titled \u2018The New History of Experience\u2019. All are welcome.<\/p>\n
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Abstract<\/u>
\nJoan Scott\u2019s 1991 criticism of appeals to experience was couched in the primacy of discourse and the abandonment of the body. She criticized those who turned to \u2018feelings\u2019 because they assumed that the category represented a reality that could not be \u2018subsumed by \u201clanguage\u201d\u2019, a so called \u2018prediscursive reality directly felt, seen, and known\u2019. Experience, on these terms, \u2018establishes a realm of reality outside of discourse and it authorizes the historian who has access to it\u2019. She insisted that \u2018experience is a linguistic event\u2019 that is not \u2018confined to a fixed order of meaning\u2019. Her inability to see how to include the body and the brain, feelings and senses, to see beyond discourse, while retaining a grip on the historicization of everything, now seems na\u00efve. She wanted to take \u2018all categories of analysis as contextual, contested, and contingent\u2019, but could not work out how this could apply to the brain or body, so dismissed them. The new history of experience shares the desire to treat \u2018the emergence of concepts and identities as historical events in need of explanation\u2019, but it does not any longer assume that it can do this within the realm of language alone. We no longer presume to isolate conceptual history from the history of the brain, from the history of emotions and\/or senses, from the history of the plastic body. But the change of perspective mutually implicates historians and social neuroscientists in each others\u2019 work. This paper reflects on our common goals and points of divergence.<\/p>\n
Biography<\/u><\/p>\n
Rob Boddice, Ph.D, FRHistS, is an historian of science, medicine and the emotions, based at Freie Universitaet Berlin and McGill University, Montreal. Boddice\u2019s research has focused on the histories of emotion and experience, with particular emphases on pain, sympathy, cruelty, disease and evolution, and on the moral status of human beings and other animals and the implications of bioculture. He received his Ph.D from the University of York (UK) in 2006, with a thesis entitled ‘Beastly Pleasures: Blood Sports in England, c.1776-1876’. He has since written six books and edited a further two. Boddice has been extensively funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and by the Marie Curie programmes of the European Commission. He is currently working on the transnational organisation of the defence of experimental medicine between 1870 and 1914, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.<\/p>\n
Human brain activation due to voluntary action. Credit:\u00a0Parashkev Nachev<\/a>.\u00a0CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n