Populisms Between History, Politics and Law: an Interdisciplinary Seminar

The present course will offer an introduction into emotion-research applied to pre-modern history, spanning from classical antiquity to the global Middle Ages. Students in the class will be presented with the main theories and concepts guiding emotion-research not only in the field of historical studies but also in the neighbor areas of cognitive, linguistic and philosophical studies, with a special focus on the emerging field of cognitive history. The course will be practically oriented so as to allow students to apply theoretical models to historical documents to be analyzed and discussed during the classes.
Learning goals: a knowledge of the main theories informing the history of the emotions in pre-modern times; the ability to use and turn theory into an epistemological tool to unpack historical sources; the skill to extract information on the experiences, the uses (social, political, ritual), the representation of the emotions from pre-modern historical sources.