Symposium participants will explore the intersection of cultural memory with emotion studies to create a methodological toolbox for historians. Both approaches contain within them the problem of integrating subjective experience with the social scientific process of researching and writing about the past. Papers will analyze an aspect of nineteenth-century German visual culture through a specific theoretical lens focusing on emotion and cultural memory; for example, the Kantian sublime, Nietzschean concepts of pain and pleasure, or Langbehn and cultural pessimism. Some of the questions under discussion might include: to what extent can emotion be theorized as a cultural or historical phenomenon? Are the interior lives of individuals relevant to historiography? What new insights can be gained through the analysis and interpretation of documentary evidence of emotions? Can historians trace the reverberations of an emotionally freighted episode through time? To what degree is identity established or shaped by individual or group reactions to events? The symposium will connect scholars working in a range of German visual culture fields, with an emphasis on analytic and practical approaches to cultural memory and/or emotion studies.

Proposals might include, but are not limited to:
• Collective experiences
• Involuntary reaction
• The emotional resonances of space
• Gendered constructions of emotion
• Commemorative practices
• Individual or group reactions, such as joy, empathy, nostalgia or sorrow
• Fabrication, fantasy, the virtual
• Physical stimulus and emotional response
• Psychoanalytic, post-psychoanalytic, and neuroscience methodologies versus emotion studies in the humanities and social sciences

The symposium will be held in June at the University of London, School of Advanced Study, Institute of Modern Languages Research, Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. Please contact Colleen Becker at colleen.becker@sas.ac.uk or Eric Anderson eanderso02@risd.edu with your 150 word max. proposals for twenty-minute papers by 20 January, 2014.