Now We Are Two

Today marks the second birthday of the History of Emotions blog. Happy birthday to us – and thanks to all our contributors and readers over the past two years! Fifty different people have written for the blog, and it currently receives about 5,000 page views per month.

This time last year we ran a series of posts on ‘What is the History of Emotions?‘ to mark our first birthday, and also listed our ten most read posts for the year.

Since then we have published 75 more posts, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to focus on some of the highlights and most read articles of the last twelve months. Several of these were written by Jules Evans, our Policy Director and blog editor.

Many of you will already know Jules, who is a researcher, philosopher and author who was named this week as one of the AHRC and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers for 2013. He has been working with us at the Centre for the History of the Emotions since 2011. Last year, Jules won AHRC funding for a ‘Connected Communities’ project on grassroots philosophy and its roles in building communities, past and present.

So, the following highlights  from the last twelve months include our most read posts and also a few selected by me as personal favourites. With difficulty I’ve whittled it down to the top eighteen! They are listed here in order of publication, starting a year ago:

James O’Shaughnessy on how the Tories got the well-being bug
by Jules Evans

The uses of anger in medieval and early modern medicine
by Elena Carrera

Does novel-reading enhance empathy?
by Roman Krznaric

What is the relationship between philosophy and comedy?
by Jules Evans 

Sensibilité and information processing: Historical approaches to “Striving to Feel”
by William M. Reddy

Spinoza: Defender of the Passions?
by Matthew Kisner

On English melancholy
by Jules Evans

The Theatre of Pain
by Rob Boddice


Moving Pictures

by Stephanie Downes

An Interview with Martha Nussbaum on Neo-Stoicism
by Jules Evans

Sick of sickness! Recovering a Happier History
by Hannah Newton 

Making Love with Constance Maynard
by Thomas Dixon 

New AHRC Report on Grassroots Philosophy
by Jules Evans

The Politics of Empathy
by Mark Honigsbaum

The Many Faces of Emotion
by Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg

The Carnival of Lost Emotions
by Chris Millard

Bad Vibrations: the history of the idea of music as pathology
An Interview with James Kennaway by Jules Evans

You can browse all of Jules Evans’s pieces for the History of Emotions blog here (and all of mine here). If you would like to write for the History of Emotions blog then do please get in touch with Jules or me.