Peter Stearns has worked with a team of scholars in North and South America to organize a series of online lectures by leading experts in the growing field of the history of emotions. The lectures, each focused on a specific emotion, are intended for a wide, non-specialist audience – students, retirement learning groups, and other interested study groups. The lectures, available in both English and Spanish, are available to the public through this website.
The purpose of this series is to introduce a wider audience to findings in the history of emotions. The lectures, and the history of emotions field more generally, are based on the understanding that key features of any emotion change overtime, and that current emotional norms can be best evaluated as products of historical change. Dealing with emotions as historical products improves our grasp of the past – understanding that emotions and emotional vocabularies of earlier periods are not exactly the same as our own – and of the process of change, ultimately leading to the present. This lecture series applies this general approach to six of the most familiar emotions: love, happiness, shame, anger, fear, and nostalgia.
The series was organized by two groups that combine scholars in the field in two major regions, the North American Chapter for Historians of Emotion (NACHE) and the Sociedad ibero-americana de la historia de las emociones y las experiences (SINEX).
September 11, 2023