COGNITION AND EMOTION IN ANCIENT HISTORICAL WRITING

The study of emotions has been a dynamic force in historical and historiographical research over the last decades, both in terms of coming to grips with the emotions represented in, and aroused by, historiographical works (Levene 1997; Marincola 2003) and of mapping the emotional landscapes of antiquity (Konstan 2006; Cairns & Nelis 2017; Cairns 2022). While this has led to a resurgence of interest in the representation and arousal of emotions in Greco-Roman literature, scholars too often assert that emotion and cognition are at odds with each other occupying different ends of a continuum. This conference takes its cue from the observation that cognition and emotion are—as thoroughly demonstrated by new neuroscience research (Grethlein et al. 2019; De Bakker et al. 2022)—deeply intertwined. The grounding belief of the conference is that a stronger focused investigation of the cognition-emotion nexus in ancient historical writing—historiography, historical epic, biography, etc.—is deeply warranted, both in order to delineate its particular workings in writings that deal with an extratextual reality and because the stories that the Greco-Romans wrote about themselves offer a privileged view into their constructions of the emotional landscapes of their own pasts. A renewed consideration has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the subject, and to shed new light on the relationship between (hi)storytelling and our cognition-emotions nexus.

Confirmed speakers

• Luuk Huitink (University of Amsterdam)
• Emily Baragwanath (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Lisa Hau (University of Glasgow)
• David Levene (New York University)

• Evert van Emde Boas (University of Aarhus)
• Peter Martin (University of Cambridge)
• Benjamin Pedersen (The Danish Institute at Athens) (Convenor)
• Carlos Heredia Chimeno (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
• Piotr Wozniczka (Universität Trier)
• Dennis Pausch (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
• Nicolas Liney (University of Oxford)
• Nicoletta Bruno (Universität Basel)
• Ide François (KU Leuven)
• Aske Damtoft Poulsen (Lund University) (Convenor)
• Leanne Jansen (Groningen University)
• Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou (University of Cyprus)

Convenors: Benjamin Pedersen (The Danish Institute at Athens) & Aske Damtoft Poulsen (Lund University)