Bettina Hitzer

An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions

This essay introduces our call for an intertwined history-of-emotions/history-of-science perspective. We argue that the history of science can greatly extend the history of emotions by proffering science qua science as a new resource for the study of emotions. We present and read science, in its multiple diversities and locations, and in its variegated activities, products, theories, and emotions, as constitutive of the norms, experiences, expressions, and regimes of emotions. Reciprocally, we call for a new reading of science in terms of emotions as an analytical category. Assuming emotions are intelligible and culturally learned, we extend the notion of emotion to include a nonintentional and noncausal “emotional style,” which is inscribed into (and can reciprocally be generated by) technologies, disease entities, laboratory models, and scientific texts. Ultimately, we argue that emotional styles interrelate with broader emotional cultures and thus can contribute to and/or challenge grand historical narratives.

Introduction to god in the city : Religious topographies in the age of urbanization

This article introduces a special issue that investigates the place of religion in the spatial and cultural organization of west and east European cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Discussing different frameworks for a conceptualization of the role of religion within the urban context during the past two hundred years, it argues for adopting a broader perspective that takes into account the multiple and often conflicting processes and practices of religious modernization. Thus, it places particular emphasis on scrutinizing a space in between, that is to say, the area of contact between the outward influence on the spatial development of religious communities on the one hand and the inner workings of such communities on the other hand. Based on an 1880s debate over the way Jewish immigrants changed the religious landscape of New York Jewry as well as on the results of the following contributions, it supports a fresh look at the turn of the century as a period of intensified religious life and visibility within metropolises that contributed to the development of more “modern,” individualized forms of religious sociability and, in the same vein, fostered the emergence of modern urbanity.This article introduces a special issue that investigates the place of religion in the spatial and cultural organization of west and east European cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Discussing different frameworks for a conceptualization of the role of religion within the urban context during the past two hundred years, it argues for adopting a broader perspective that takes into account the multiple and often conflicting processes and practices of religious modernization. Thus, it places particular emphasis on scrutinizing a space in between, that is to say, the area of contact between the outward influence on the spatial development of religious communities on the one hand and the inner workings of such communities on the other hand. Based on an 1880s debate over the way Jewish immigrants changed the religious landscape of New York Jewry as well as on the results of the following contributions, it supports a fresh look at the turn of the century as a period of intensified religious life and visibility within metropolises that contributed to the development of more “modern,” individualized forms of religious sociability and, in the same vein, fostered the emergence of modern urbanity.

The Feeling Body and Its Diseases: How Cancer Went Psychosomatic in Twentieth-Century Germany

This essay examines how psychosomatic medicine, as it emerged between 1920 and 1960, introduced new ideas about the emotional body and the emotional self. Focusing on cancer, a shift can be mapped over the course of the twentieth century. While cancer was regarded at the beginning of the century as the organic disease par excellence, traceable to malignant cells and thus not caused or influenced by emotions, in later decades it would come to be thoroughly investigated within the field of psychosomatic medicine. This essay illuminates why and how this shift occurred in Germany and how it was affected by the earlier turn toward a psychosomatic understanding of cancer in the United States.