Emotion Sense Experience

Emotion Sense Experience calls on historians of emotions and the senses to come together in serious and sustained dialogue. The Element outlines the deep if largely unacknowledged genealogy of historical writing insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. Ultimately we envisage a new way of understanding historical lived experience generally as a mutable product of a situated world-brain-body dynamic. Such a project necessarily points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration especially with social neuroscience. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience we re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.