This graduate seminar explores affect both as an object of historical inquiry and as a methodological and theoretical tool in historical research. We will examine the distinctions and overlaps between affect, emotion, feeling, and sensibility, and consider how these categories structure historical experience, narrative, and interpretation.

Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of affect and the history of emotions, the seminar invites students to engage critically with the affective dimensions of the past, and the ways affect shapes historical processes and the production of historical knowledge. How does affect shape how we research, write, read, and relate to history? What roles do emotion and feeling play in the lives of historical subjects — and in the experiences of historians themselves? These questions will guide our inquiry into how affect reflects and produces historical meaning.