Call for Papers:

German Studies Association Conference, Phoenix, AZ

September 24-27, 2026

Affects and Emotions in the Long Eighteenth Century

Panel sponsored by the Lessing Society

In light of the centrality of affects and emotions in today’s political and cultural landscape, this panel aims to trace their prominence and functions in the long eighteenth century. We invite papers that explore the complex emotive spectrum ranging from affects – basic, often automatic feeling states linked to arousal, valence, and physiological responses – to more context-specific, conscious, and sustained emotions that integrate bodily reactions with higher-level cognition and influence thought, decision-making, and social behavior. Although the conceptual vocabulary of the eighteenth century differs significantly from contemporary usage, can we nonetheless identify categories that correspond to our modern distinctions between transient affects, sustained passions, subjective feelings (Gefühl), and socially mediated, complex emotions?

This period of profound cultural, intellectual, social, and political transformation provided an ecosystem in which affects and emotions were unleashed, regulated, and steered. Examples include the “invention” of human rights through the epistemological integration of sensitivity and empathy into notions of the individual (Lynn Hunt) and the birth of aesthetic theories exploring the relationship between affects, emotions, morality and sensitivity (Baumgarten, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller). At the same time, intense affects and emotions – especially pleasant ones – were often tainted by their association with entertainment and femininity and came under close scrutiny as potential corruptors of good taste. In parallel, we also consider the minor, ambivalent, “ugly” feelings – irritation, envy, anxiety – that reveal how everyday forms of control and precarity inform what subjects can do (Sianne Ngai).

The panel will investigate the historical, social, and cultural processes by which affects and emotions drew a new kind of attention in the long eighteenth century. Papers might offer insights into how they were evoked, perceived, and strategically mobilized and/or analyze their interplay with emerging orders – such as the literary market, the bourgeois family, “modern” gender roles, racialization, colonial trade and fantasies, industrialization and “nature.” How were these orders shaped through affects and emotions, and how, in turn, were emotions and affective responses integrated within them?

Please send proposals by March 6, 2026 to Thomas Martinec (thomas.martinec@ur.de), Claudia Nitschke (claudia.nitschke@durham.ac.uk), and Heidi Schlipphacke (heidis@uic.edu)