Professor Robin Dunbar is the Director of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford and the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Here he shares his thoughts about the arithmetic of friendship. __________ … Continue reading
Amanda E. Herbert is Assistant Professor of History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Her first book is Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2014. This … Continue reading
Naomi Tadmor is Professor of History at Lancaster University. She has researched and written about the histories of the family, religious life, language, and friendship in the early modern period. She is the author of Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England. … Continue reading
Dr Sally Holloway is a historian of emotions, material culture, and romantic love. She contributed to the research for Five Hundred Years of Friendship, and is an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the … Continue reading
True Detective has an unusual amount of theology for a cop show. The hero, Rustin Cohle, is a fervent atheist, who delivers soliloquies on the meaninglessness of existence as he and his partner drive to the next crime scene. Human … Continue reading
I’m researching ecstatic experiences at the moment, which involves looking at ecstasy in the arts. This morning I’ve been reading some Edward Hirsch, the poet and literary critic, who has a very ecstatic conception of art. That’s quite rare these … Continue reading
Is it taboo for academics to talk about their spiritual experiences? What can the humanities bring to the study of such experiences? Can we steer between the Scylla of religious dogmatism and the Charybidis of materialist reductionism when interpreting such experiences? I … Continue reading
This is a guest post by Carolyn Pedwell, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University and AHRC Visiting Scholar at The Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London. With the rise of the … Continue reading
Dr Sally Holloway completed her AHRC-funded PhD on romantic love in eighteenth-century England at Royal Holloway in 2013. She is currently a Historical Researcher at Kensington Palace, and Affiliated Research Scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions. … Continue reading
The Centre helped to organize and fund an event in November, held at Birkbeck, called Stoicism for Everyday Life. It brought together classicists, philosophers and psychologists, as well 300 or so members of the public, to talk about how to … Continue reading