The present course intends to offer students and introduction to the basic conceptual tools and interpretative strategies that will allow them to understand, explore, and interpret critically emotions past and present from a historical perspective, i.e., as a potential source for reconstructing and deconstructing the past. The course will provide an introduction to the basic theoretical framework (i.e., the specific concepts, technical terminology, and interpretative strategies introduced by scholars who have defined the history of emotions as a new field of historical research in the last decades) necessary for exploring emotions and their various inscriptions in ideological discourses and the practices of social interaction these generated in past and present contexts. The course will also give students the opportunity to apply this conceptual framework and the hermeneutical strategies associated with it in practice to a series of case studies. These are meant to illustrate the way in which specific emotions could be and were constructed discoursively and pragmatically by specific actants inspired by ideological agendas in different historical configurations. Through a combination of theoretical surveys (in the form of interactive lectures) and practical exercises (both in-class and take-home) meant to illustrate the concepts surveyed, by the end of the course the students should acquire the necessary instruments that will allow them to explore discoursive constractions of emotions and identify and question uncritical assumptions about their relations with social practices as well as identify the various ideological agendas (both pre-modern and contemporary) on which both were based and which they served.
Full details here.