About this Cambridge Elements series:

Born of the emotional and sensory ‘turns’, Elements on Histories of Emotions and the Senses move one of the fastest-growing interdisciplinary fields forward. They probe happiness and fear, smell and sound—and they ask if these can be neatly separated by discrete words, or if they are cross-cultural. They concern and problematize such topics as affect theory, the dichotomy of discourse vs. experience, intersensoriality, multisensory processing, embodiment, distributed cognition, epigenetics, human-animal relations and affective neuroscience. They touch on issues of pressing socio-political and sociomedical relevance, such as ‘felt facts’, racism and hate speech, mental health, emotional labour and artificial intelligence. Chronologically and regionally broad, ranging from deep to transnational and global history, the series speaks to scholars from the humanities, social sciences and life sciences, including anthropology, art history, (cognitive) neuroscience, cultural studies, (behavioural) economics, philosophy, gender studies, history, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, queer theory, rhetoric, sociology, theology.

About the editors

Rob Boddice (PhD, FRHistS) is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences. He is the author/editor of 13 books, including Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity Press, 2023), Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and A History of Feelings (Reaktion, 2019).

Piroska Nagy is Professor of Medieval History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and initiated the first research program in French on the history of emotions. She is the author or editor of 14 volumes, including Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge (Albin Michel, 2000); Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, with Damien Boquet (Polity, 2018); and Histoire des émotions collectives: Épistémologie, émergences, expériences, with D. Boquet and L. Zanetti Domingues (Classiques Garnier, 2022).

Mark Smith (PhD, FRHistS) is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is author or editor of over a dozen books and his work has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Danish, German, and Spanish.  He has lectured in Europe, throughout the United States, Australia, and China and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the London Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He serves on the US Commission for Civil Rights.