Histories of Sensibilities

Histories of Sensibilities: Visions of Gender, Race, and Emotions in the Global Enlightenment explores the historical and plural character of sensibility in the Global Enlightenment.

From Tahiti to New Orleans to the Mariana Islands; to Lima, Geneva, London, Oviedo, or Venice, the book investigates how sensibility was brandished by different ethnic, political, and cultural groups to define their identities; how cross-cultural and cross-chronological encounters reconfigured ideas of gendered selves; how sexuality was used to empower or subjugate non-European ethnicities; and how the circulation of theories about the origin of emotions and taste reinforced or challenged hegemonic ideas of masculinity and femininity.

With a primary focus on Southern Europe and the Hispanic World, areas still not well-charted, this edited collection explores the varied forms in which notions of sensibilities circulated within Europe and between Europe, the Americas, and the Hispanic-Asian Pacific, questioning normative and diffusionist views.

Histories of Sensibilities is aimed at postgraduate students and scholars researching the histories of literature and science, cultural studies, the history of emotions, gender studies, and women’s history; as well as scholars of Hispanic studies, Latin-America studies, and European studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

Isabel Burdiel is Professor of History at the Universitat de València (Spain) and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UK). She is a specialist in the political and cultural history of European liberalism. Her book Isabel II. Una biografía won the National Prize of History (Spain) in 2011. She is the author of the first critical edition in Spanish of Mary W. Shelley's Frankenstein (1996).

Ester García Moscardó is Assistant Professor at the UNED in Madrid (Spain), and has been Postdoctoral Researcher in CIRGEN (ERC AdG-707815) at the Universitat de València (Spain). Her current research focuses on the construction of racial and gender imaginaries within the culture of sensibility and their reworking throughout the nineteenth century.

Elena Serrano is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Institut d’Història de la Ciència (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain). She has published on Enlightened female networks, gender and the history of science, and the history of science and emotions. Her last book is Ladies of Honor and Merit: Gender, Useful Knowledge and Politics in Enlightened Spain (2022).

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