Intergenerational Emotions and the Making of History Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide; Annual Lecture in the History of Women, Gender and Sexuality

This year's School of History Annual Lecture in the History of Women, Gender and Sexuality will be given by Katie Barclay, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions and Head of Historical and Classical Studies at the University of Adelaide. She writes widely on gender, family life and the history of emotions.

Our family inheritances shape our engagement with the past and that is as true for historians as it is for the general public. This lecture explores the uses of our own family histories in the construction of historical narratives, considering how our emotional engagements with our ancestors come to inform the types of histories that we write and the lessons that emerge.

Katie is particularly interested in exploring the concept of ‘intergenerational emotions' as a mechanism for understanding this phenomenon and its growth in the twentieth century. Charting a variety of forms of emotional engagement with our ancestors, from the application of psychoanalytical theory to contemporary ‘history of emotions' approaches that value feeling as a scholarly mode, Katie's research particularly attends to how family feeling is gendered.

Gender emerges not only in the ancestors that historians identify with and whose stories they narrate (often those of the same gender), but in the types of narratives that family histories enable. Here intergenerational emotions are interwoven through particular gendered imaginings of what family is and can be.