New Zealand's History of Emotions

The recent History of Emotions Conference gathered top national and international scholars to explore the latest research in emotions.

Distraught person

New Zealanders have famously been described as “passionless people”. Others have noted our dramatic swing from repression to explosion in our national literature and film. Earlier this month, Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies dedicated a three-day gathering of scholars to exploring this topic with the History of Emotions Conference (PDF download).

About 90 academics from all over the country and beyond gathered to discuss the history of New Zealand’s emotional landscape. Topics traversed the spectrum of disciplines, with 50 speakers presenting their work on the history of emotion in areas such as the criminal justice system, World War One nurses and returned soldiers, New Zealand literature, film and documentary, colonial immigrants, cycle rage and the Kiwi kitchen as the heart and home in rural New Zealand.

Stout Research Centre director and conference organiser Professor Lydia Wevers says the conference theme was inspired by the work of the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in Australia.

“The history of emotions is quite a big thing in Australia. But the Centre’s focus is on medieval and early modern history, and stops at the eighteenth century. We thought it’d be good to talk about emotions closer to today, and in a New Zealand context.

“It was a very popular conference. I think what people liked about it was the disciplinary range. People liked hearing about areas of research they didn’t know about,” she says.

Another key point was to include research on animal emotions and specifically their emotional interplay with humans, with discussions ranging from the entanglement of humans and horses to the ways humans represent and understand the emotional lives of sheep.

Professor Wevers says it was an honour to have Professor Joanna Bourke from Birkbeck University of London as one of the keynote speakers. The professor of history, prize-winning author and Fellow of the British Academy opened the conference examining the renegotiation of masculine ideals with the return of World War One soldiers maimed by war.

The conference was sponsored by the Ministry for Culture & Heritage.