Introduction

'Solastalgia', 'eco-anxiety', 'eco-grief': in the past two decades, neologisms have flourished to describe how climate change and human-induced environmental damages are giving birth to new emotional states. But the idea that climate can drive us mad or sad is not entirely new. By bringing together environmental history, medical history and the history of emotions, this workshop seeks to historicise our emotional relation to climate and the natural environment.

Bringing together scholars from Australia, France, Switzerland, the UK and the US, the workshop will try to map how our emotional perceptions of climate(s), weather and the environment evolved from the 18th to the 21st century, and how climatic and natural elements were related to emotions such as fear, anxiety, or pleasure in specific historical, social, and political contexts. It will offer the opportunity to study how emotions are shaped by personal experiences, collective representations, medical and lay knowledges. It will also allow to identify potential sources for an emotional history of the environment, such as private diaries, weather almanacs, medical treatises, and psychiatric archives.

This workshop is organised by Anatole Le Bras. It is funded by the Centre for History and Economics in Paris and hosted by the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po.