Researching the History of Emotions: A Masterclass with Prof. Sasha Turner and Prof. Katie Barclay

This session brings Professor Sasha Turner (John Hopkins) and Professor Katie Barclay (Macquarie University) in conversation to discuss how they approach emotions in their research and the challenges of emotional investment as historians of the emotions.

This will include a panel discussion and Q&A.

All are welcome to attend, regardless of career stage.

The workshop will take place 10.00-12.00. A hot Indian buffet will be served at 12pm.

This will be a hybrid event. Please contact the event organiser Naomi Pullin (naomi.pullin@warwick.ac.uk) for more information and for a joining link.

Sasha Turner

Professor Sasha Turner is a historian of the Caribbean at Johns Hopkins, with current special interest in the period of colonialism and enslavement. Her current research focuses on understanding the lives of women and children and how they navigated racial and gendered subjectivities. Tentatively titled, Slavery, Emotions, and Gender, this project explores the role of emotion in structuring the power struggles that defined enslavement, including how enslaver and enslaved deployed emotion for social, cultural, and political goals. She is the author of the award-winning book Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and an important essay on black maternal grief. She has received numerous awards, including: The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize, The Julia Spurill Prize, for the best published book in southern women’s history; The Murdo J. McLeod Prize, awarded by the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association, and

The Maria Stewart Prize, awarded by the African American Intellectual History Society.

Katie Barclay

Professor Katie Barclay is a Future Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. She is an internationally leading expert in the history of emotions, gender and family life. She has particular expertise in how people display, construct and understand emotions in a variety of contexts, but particularly within family relationships and childhood studies, including marriage, parent-child and sibling relationships. This includes histories of love and intimacy, grief and anger and more.
She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650-1850 (Manchester, 2011), Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity, 1800-1845 (Manchester, 2019); A History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Sources and Methods (Basingstoke, 2020); Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford, 2021); Academic Emotions: Feeling the Institution (Cambridge, 2021); with Leanne Downing, Memes, Emotions and the Making of History (Cambridge, 2023); Loneliness in World History (London, 2025), and numerous edited collections, book chapters and articles. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including the Canadian Historical Association Neil Sutherland Prize; The Royal Historical Society David Berry Prize; The Senior Hume-Brown Prize for Scottish History and the Women's History Network Book Prize.