Science and Emotions After 1945 ─ A Transatlantic Perspective

Among current trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the emotions (and history of emotions) continues strong as the hottest area of historical inquiry. There is already an important journal, Emotion Review, which celebrates emotions as now constituting ?one of the great hubs in the scientific study of the human condition.” Biess and Gross have assembled the smartest and most prominent scholars working in the history of science and history of emotions, two fields which this book is the first to conjoin. Known already as the ?emotional” or ?affective turn,” the trend can be explained as the product of a gradual rediscovery of emotion as an analytical category after a period of dormancy. Biological and physiological models of emotion, thanks to the growth of neuroscience, are fueling this rediscovery, and this edited volume is organized according to the different scientific disciplines in which emotions figure in (neuroscience, medicine, psychiatry, social sciences), but in each case bringing a humanities perspective to bear on the concepts, methods, and data. The book offers a new way of thinking about the origins of the emotional turn, and offers a much-needed transnational perspective.

Frank Biess is professor of history at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. He lives in California. Daniel M. Gross is associate professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s "Rhetoric" to Modern Brain Science. He lives in California.