Emotions in Adversity: Disease, War, Crisis

Rather than focussing explicitly on negative emotions, this conference centres negative contexts to explore the emotional repertoires of adversity. Diseases, wars, and political,

economic and cultural crises form a topical backdrop to historical investigat ions into the mobilisation of fear, rage, hate and disgust as well as unexpected instances of courage, love, hope and joy in times and places defined by calamity, catastrophe, and hostility. We welcome proposals that challenge, or even disrupt, assumptions about the emotional causes and consequences of adversity, conflict and ill health, particularly in relation to the dynamics of collective experience –whether consonant or dissonant– across a variety of diYerent scales (local, national, global).

This conference also serves as the concluding event of the ERC project GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919). Emerging from the project as its core, the conference will integrate a series of specially designed panels that revolve around the project’s central themes–music, sound and emotions,and their imbrication in disease contexts – while situating them within a broader historical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary framework.

In line with the project’s overarching aims, we are especially interested in proposals that examine music and sound in contexts of adversity, as well as the wide spectrum of historical

sources that extend beyond language, such as architecture, space, material culture, painting, photography, and more. We particularly welcome contributions that take theoretical,

methodological, and interdisciplinary risks in order to integrate emotional, sensory, cognitive, and embodied dime nsions into the cultural and political varieties of historical experience.