Emotions and Labour in the Early Modern World
8 April 2025
Scarman Conference Centre, University of Warwick
Organised by Dr Naomi Pullin (University of Warwick) and Dr Charmian Mansell (University of Sheffield)
Registration is essential. Please contact the organisers to attend: naomi.pullin@warwick.ac.uk / c.mansell@sheffield.ac.uk.
Over the last fifty years, the history of the emotions has developed into a productive and well-established field. Curiosity about how people felt in the past and the intersection between experiences, identities and emotions has generated a rich seam of scholarship across time and place. Meanwhile, histories of work have also flourished, with ever-expanding sub-fields from labour history and occupational structure to women’s work and enforced labour attracting considerable attention in recent years. But despite rich scholarship in both fields, studies of the two rarely intersect.
This one-day workshop aims to explore new methodologies and approaches to studying emotions in histories of early modern work. It asks: how can we use the history of emotions as a framework or category of analysis in the study of work? How can we access how people felt about work in the past? What methodologies can we use? From what sources can we unpick emotional labour as well as emotions about labour? And what does a focus on the emotional work connected to marginalised types of labouring identity, such as care, motherhood, health, and forced/indentured labour enable us to contribute to histories of work and occupational identity more broadly?
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Provisional Programme
9.00-9.30 Arrival and Coffee
09.30-9.45 Welcome
09.45-10.45 Panel 1: Emotions and the Labour of Travel
Dr Eva Johanna Holmberg (Queen Mary, University of London) – on emotions and seventeenth-century English travellers to the Ottoman empire
Dr Richard Ansell (University of Leicester) – on the emotional labour of servants on the Grand Tour
10.45-11.00 Break
11.00-12.30 Panel 2: Emotions and forced/unfree labour
Prof. David Lambert (Warwick) – the emotional labour of military service in the revolutionary Caribbean
Dr Danelle Gutarra-Cordero (Liberal Arts, Warwick) – an intellectual history of racialized slavery and emotions in the early modern Atlantic
Prof. Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University) – emotions, gender and slavery in the Caribbean and colonial diaspora
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-14.30 Panel 3: Emotions and the Labour of Care
Dr Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (University of Cardiff) - Medical Care, Surgeons and Emotions at Sea
Dr Emma Marshall (University of York) – Sickness and healthcare in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century elite English families
14.30-15.00 Break
15.00-16.30 Panel 4: Emotions and occupations
Dr Robert Stearn - ‘Conceptualising Emotions as Work and Skill in Early Modern Service: Evidence from Handbooks, Diaries, and Prose Fiction’
Prof. Katie Barclay (Macquarie University) - The Emotions of Eighteenth-Century Bankers
16.30-17.00 Roundtable/concluding discussions
