However, historians of emotions are faced with a series of methodological impasses and challenges, comprising both philosophy of history (are emotions perennial or culturally and historically constructed?) and disciplinary limits (how does the historian presume to interpret descriptions of emotional experience in primary source texts?). In this roundtable, four early-career scholars will reflect on their ongoing historical work at the intersection of emotion and governance. Discussants will explore the historical centrality of emotion to state formation, political ideology and participation, legality and legal culture, and national and political identities. They will reflect on the methodological and historiographical challenges and possibilities immanent in framing and recovering the place of emotions in governance.

This roundtable brings together scholarship across diverse historical regions and periods, from twelfth-century England to Vietnam in the early national period. The speakers bring together secondary methodologies in legal history, cultural history, intellectual history, gender history and political history. With the help of our chair, Kathryn Temple, an historian of emotional culture in eighteenth-century England, we will reflect explicitly on the convergences and divergences in the historical and methodological placement of our interventions. We will work from these historiographical reflections to predictive ones on the future of emotional history.

We welcome, and will leave ample time for, open discussion with the audience on the methods, limitations, and outcomes of bringing the history of emotions to questions of political theory and practice, law, political organization and participation, governability and governance. It is our hope that participants and audience alike will leave this session with new ideas about how the history of emotions can continue to contribute to our understanding of governance and vice versa.