Interdisciplinary Workshop for Ph.D. Students and Early Career Researchers
Rethinking the Emotions from a Historical Perspective
VENUE: Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, Prague, Czech Republic
CONFERENCE DATE: 4.9.2025-5.9.2025
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS: 16.03.2025
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Alper Cakir, Anna Chejnova, and David De Pablo
CONTACT: workshophistorycu@gmail.com
The history of emotions helps us understand human experience by showing how feelings influence behavior, decision-making, and social interactions. Studying how people have felt, expressed, and understood emotions in different times and places reveals the ways emotions have shaped everyday life. This field draws on psychology, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and many others, bringing together different perspectives that deepen our understanding of emotions and how they are expressed across cultures and historical periods. Emotions influence how people perceive and engage with others, impacting social bonds, identity, decision-making, and group dynamics. The study of emotions seeks to understand their social construction - how societies and cultures shape emotional expression and interpretation - as well as their biological underpinnings and psychological effects. By examining emotions, insights could be gained into the motivations behind actions, the formation of social hierarchies, and the development of empathy, conflict, and cooperation within communities.
The inquiry into understanding emotions is vital in historical studies and related fields, contributing significantly to interpreting various social and historical phenomena. While the abstracts can explore topics from the list below, they are not constrained to these choices:
How different cultures describe their emotions
Translation of emotion and affection
Emotions and feelings attached to objects
Expressions of Love and hatred in historical sources
Demonstrations and representations of Personal and collective fear and hope
The relationship between memory and emotions
Rationality and emotion as a cognitive process
Emotions in contentious politics
Emotional repertoires of pre-modern and modern societies
Emotions and the 'other'
Social psychology and acceptable emotions in societies
The conference encourages broad and inclusive participation by issuing an open call for papers. It invites Ph.D. students and early career researchers from Charles University and the international academic community to explore emotions from historical and multidisciplinary perspectives. Alongside history, the conference welcomes insights from fields like anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and law. The workshop aims to foster productive discussions on the topic and to build strong academic connections for potential future collaborations. The event will be held in person, conducted in English, and requires submission of a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV by March 16, 2025. Abstracts will be carefully reviewed, and authors will receive notifications of acceptance or rejection within one month. Each participant will have 20 minutes for their presentation, followed by a Q&A session. The workshop may also feature keynote talks from academic experts in the field.
Hosted at Charles University, participants are responsible for covering their own travel, accommodation, and related expenses. The organizers plan to publish selected papers in either the conference proceedings or a themed section of an open-access scholarly journal. The authors of the chosen papers will be informed via email after the selection process, providing them with more details about deadlines, the journal's style, and so on.
Univerzita Karlova
Fakulta humanitních studií
Oddělení doktorského studia
Pátkova 2137/5
182 00 Praha 8 - Libeň
místnost 1.25