Emotions and Archives

This volume examines the interplay between emotions and archives from the 18th to the 21st century. Exploring how feelings have affected the ways in which the past is preserved, remembered, controlled and experienced by various peoples and societies, and how such dynamics unfold in the present, it investigates both how people's emotions affect archives as an environment, and how emotions themselves influence our interaction with historical records. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners working in public, private, traditional and digital archives around the world, it offers a novel cross-section of ways in which emotions are understood and defined, and of the function they perform across time and space. Building on current discussions around emotions, affect and trauma-informed practices in archival studies, chapters in this collection adopt a broad spectrum of methodologies from oral interviews to discourse analysis and auto-ethnography. Sketching the ways in which emotions and archives affect one another, this book uncovers the emotional dynamics that govern individual and collective relationships in both past and present.