Call for Papers: ‘Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World’
Department of History, University of Reading, November 17-18, 2022 This workshop will bring together historians researching the roles that emotions played in the creation, maintenance, and experience of slavery in the Atlantic World. Fundamental to how enslavers wielded power, the enslaved also used emotion as a method of resistance, and it was clearly central to their everyday lived experiences. It is almost impossible to read testimony left by the enslaved, or sources produced by enslavers, without encountering mentions of acute feelings, yet studies are only recently beginning to emerge that explore slavery through the lens of emotion. The value of pursuing this avenue of research has been exemplified by recent historiographical turns focused on the ‘history of emotions’ and the analysis of archival silences. Historians of emotion have fruitfully demonstrated that to understand societies, we must explore how emotional conventions functioned and how ordinary people created their own emotional worlds. […]