This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions | |
|---|---|
| Name | ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions |
| Established | 2011 |
| Dissolved | 2018 |
| Location | Australia |
| Director | Professor Greg Dening (founding) |
| Focus | Historical studies of emotions |
ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions was an Australian research centre established to investigate historical change in affective practices across time and space, bringing together scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Europe. The Centre connected researchers working on medieval, early modern and modern periods across projects rooted in archives such as the British Library, National Library of Australia, Bodleian Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France and collections associated with institutions like University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Yale University and University of Melbourne.
The Centre was conceived through competitive funding from the Australian Research Council and launched amid portfolios held by research leaders associated with Monash University, University of Western Australia, University of Adelaide and University of Melbourne, following precedents set by multidisciplinary initiatives such as the Wellcome Trust-funded projects and the European Research Council networks. Its formation brought together scholars with prior affiliations to projects at King's College London, University College London, University of Toronto, Princeton University and University of Edinburgh, building on historiographical debates originating in the work of figures linked to Michel Foucault, William Reddy, Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein.
Research programs investigated affective regimes, practices of mourning, love, anger and fear, and spaces of emotional performance in political and cultural contexts such as the French Revolution, English Civil War, American Revolution, World War I, World War II and the Cold War. Comparative projects examined correspondence collections including letters tied to Elizabeth I, Charles I, Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Catherine the Great and Franz Joseph I. Thematic strands engaged with visual and material culture found in archives related to Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh as well as literary sources by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf.
The organisational structure combined a central management node with nodes at partner universities including University of Sydney, Griffith University, Australian National University, La Trobe University and Curtin University. Leadership drew on directors and chief investigators with prior positions at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley and University of Chicago, and governance involved advisory input from scholars linked to Max Planck Society, Smithsonian Institution, Tate Modern and Victoria and Albert Museum.
Major projects included digital mappings of emotional geographies, archival editions of letters from figures such as Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke and Simón Bolívar, and collaborative exhibitions mounted with partners like the National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of New South Wales, British Museum and Musée du Louvre. International collaborations involved research networks connected to Humboldt University of Berlin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Trinity College Dublin, University of Leiden and Sciences Po and cross-disciplinary partnerships with institutes such as the Wellcome Collection and the Institute of Historical Research.
The Centre ran graduate programs, postdoctoral fellowships and professional development workshops for doctoral candidates connected to curricula at University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts, Monash School of Historical Studies, Australian National University School of History, University of Sydney School of Humanities and partner doctoral training centres affiliated with European University Institute. Public engagement included exhibitions, lecture series featuring speakers associated with Mary Beard, Simon Schama, Jill Lepore, Natalie Zemon Davis and Dominic Lieven, and outreach events co-curated with institutions like the National Museum of Australia, Royal Institution and Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Outputs comprised peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published by presses such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan and Bloomsbury, along with journal articles in titles including Past & Present, Journal of Modern History, History Workshop Journal, American Historical Review and English Historical Review. Digital resources included curated corpora, searchable letter databases, digitised manuscripts from collections like the State Library of Victoria, image repositories referencing holdings at the National Portrait Gallery (London), and methodological toolkits developed in collaboration with digital humanities centres at King's College London and University College London.
During its funded term the Centre and its investigators received prizes and fellowships such as the Rhodes Scholarship, Fulbright Program, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, ARC Discovery Project grants and awards from learned societies including the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the British Academy. Its legacy persisted through successor networks, curated archives retained by partner institutions like the National Archives of Australia and continued influence on historiography relating to emotion studies alongside scholarship by figures linked to William Reddy, Ruth Mazo Karras, Keith Thomas, Joyce Appleby and Geoffrey Parker.
Category:Research institutes in Australia Category:History of emotions