Third Biennial Conference for the Society for the History of Emotions
Florence, 30 August – 2 September 2022

The Third Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Emotions (SHE) will focus on mobility, migration, exile, traversing of space, and emotions. The current, at times heated debates about migration in Europe, Australia, North America and elsewhere necessitate a profound and critical historical contextualisation, especially from a history-of-emotions point of view. Hope, fear, hatred, empathy, all manner of feelings shape peoples’ movements around the globe and the ways in which newcomers are heartily welcomed, coldly brushed off or fiercely attacked. Using archival, literary and other sources, this conference will explore the emotions that motivate people to go elsewhere, and the emotional responses of displaced peoples and the communities they orbit and join.

We call for papers and panels investigating case studies that concern the movement of people and their feelings about places and other people, from homesickness to wanderlust, from belonging to estrangement. We also want to discuss the political, economical and emotional conditions that instigate transnational movements and inform how men and women cope with and react to these mobilities.

We’ll engage with how people who have been socialised in different emotional communities learn to read each other’s emotional gestures and utterances; and will examine the affective entanglement between diasporic communities, their homelands and host communities. In short, we aim to bring research on migration and mobility to bear on the historical study of emotions, and vice versa.

We shall accept papers and panels on the following topics, as well as other potentially relevant topics not listed below:
• explorers, travellers and tourists
• dynamics of emigration, immigration and remigration
• itinerant workers
• slavery and indentured labour
• movements of colonising and colonised subjects
• feelings of inclusion and exclusion, of longing and alienation
• letters and other means by which people maintain affective bonds across countries
• migratory experiences of racism and emotional coping strategies
• emotional practices and narratives of welcome or rejection
• memory, memoires, writing practices related to experiences of migration, displacement, exile
• literary and other accounts of emotional practices linked to separation, return, nostalgia, melancholy, etc.
Chronologically, papers can delve into the ancient, the medieval and early modern, or the modern period. In geographical terms we welcome contributions on local, regional or global mobilities in areas across the world. Transdisciplinary contributions are welcome.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Proposals should consist of a title, abstract of up to 300 words and a short bio, to be sent via email as a pdf attachment to SHEFlorence22@gmail.com by 1 March 2022. We also accept proposals for panels of three papers, which should include all of the above for each presenter, a panel title and abstract for the panel itself and, if possible, the name and short bio of the panel chair.

Participants will be notified by late March 2022.