Between 1835 and 1852, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) held the Office of Governor of Buenos Aires and was granted extraordinary power. During his ruthless rule, political opponents were eliminated by means of state terror. Through travel reports, political essays and the press Europe got acquainted with the ruler of a region which began to bear more and more political and economic relevance to French and British interests. Eventually, these nations got involved in the Uruguayan Civil War between the Argentine Confederation led by General Rosas and the liberal Unitarians in Montevideo. If Charles Darwin, who had met Rosas during his second voyage of HMS Beagle, considered him “a man of an extraordinary character” and eulogised his proficiency in leading his hacienda and the province, French writer Alexandre Dumas père depicted the governor in his 1850 novel Montevideo, or the New Troy as a cruel despot without morals. Whether in the shaping of a historical figure or in the character of a novel, emotions play a decisive role. Besides this, as argued by Hayden White, nineteenth-century historiography bore plot similarities with literature genres. My paper seeks to highlight the role of emotions (e.g. fear, terror, honour, hope etc.) within the migration of the images of this controversial ruler from Argentina to Europe. In doing so, I engage a view by means of multidimensional narratives of otherness under constitutional (parliamentary regimes vs. dictatorship), political (colonial vs. post-colonial situation) and geographical aspects (Western Europe vs. South America).

It may be said that families dispersed for social or political reasons to different parts of the globe were like satellites or capsules of culture, who then became the main custodians of a cultural preservation, where time more or less stood still. Like other recently arrived migrants following WWII, settlers from regional Calabria immersed themselves in the familiar and clung to the traditions and customs of their homeland. The importance of maintaining cultural attributes was due to the belief that the same thing was happening back in their place of origin. Through the modes of narrative enquiry and autoethnography, my multidisciplinary arts practice-based research investigates, interprets and translates the experiences of Calabrian settlers to Victoria’s North West, in a contemporary visual art and sociological context. Notions of belief and religious practices, gender roles and stereotypes, family relationships, nostalgia, and cultural loss and preservation are also explored in my work. ‘Tracciando fili del passato’ [Tracing Threads of the Past], is an ongoing series of live art performances, installations and video explorations, which incorporate the transformation of self into an imagined version of my Calabrian grandmothers. During these enactments, I make artefacts utilising traditional women’s modes of making – sewing, embroidery and crochet. These activities are chosen in order to highlight the significance of women’s handmade craft work, which were once an important aspect of family relationships, passed from mother to daughter. The work is a manifestation of their hopes and dreams and strives to honour the women migrants whose voices were not always heard on account of dominant gender roles within the Calabrian diaspora of 1950s, 60s and 70s Australia. This paper was part of the 'Emotions of Cultures/ Cultures of Emotions: Comparative Perspectives' conference. 11–13 DECEMBER 2017, at THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA The conference encouraged discussion across disciplines, cultures and historical periods, with a particular focus on broadening emotions history beyond its hitherto largely Western context.

During the Early modern period, closer relations between Europe and the rest of the world led many Jesuits to sail for the Western or Eastern Indies in order to spend the rest of their lives there as missionaries. Learning about their adventures, young pupils from all over the continent asked insistently and with specific letters (“Litterae Indipetae”) filled with pathos and enthusiasm to be sent there. In this paper, we will analyse how hard it was for a young man, studying or teaching in the Jesuit colleges in most cases, to seek his personal autonomy and vocation whilst being at the same time obedient and indifferent as a Jesuit was requested to be. In particular, two were the authorities which often the so called “indipeti” (petitioners for the Indies) wanted to get rid of: their families (especially the pater familias, but also tearful mothers and little siblings) and their local superiors (who frequently were accused of trying to keep them in their native Provinces). We will focus on the Litterae Indipetae aimed to obtain the Chinese Empire, considering alongside source material that is unknown in this area of research, the Epistulae Generalium. These registers of correspondence, sent from the office of the Superior General in Rome, include the personal answers to numerous petitioners for the Indies. These provide us with a valuable window into the multiple perspectives and processes involved in the selection of candidates for the overseas Jesuit missions, where personal vocation and power issues were inextricably intertwined.

This paper examines conceptions of private and public life and the role of emotional display, primarily through the analysis of historical works in Latin and the vernacular, produced in Castile and León in the period c. 1250 to 1350. The aim of the paper is to discover how emergent notions of private and public related to the regulation of proper emotional display. I will discuss whether specific emotions where indeed deemed appropriate only in certain spheres of life, whether it is possible to be sure which concepts and practices were considered “emotional” in medieval societies, and how communities that disparaged excessive emotional display handled affective responses that routinely went against theoretical understandings and ideals. I will argue that the virtue of moderation (mesura) came to assume a great deal of sociopolitical significance in this period, partly through the attempts of Alfonso X the Learned (r.1252– 1284) to implement a courtly, aristocratic knighthood, partly by noble responses such as that of Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), and partly through the historiographical discourse on a larger scale, that staged and represented this virtue in a particular manner that was arguably much more influential than any juridical doctrine or purely didactic work. Can we consider chronicles then to teach the management of emotions, in the likeness of mirrors of princes? I would argue that the didactic qualities inherent in medieval history writing support such a perspective. Part of the paper will be aimed at examining the significance of the cross-cultural connections between Christian and Islamic societies in medieval Iberia. Contemporary Islamic historiography will be compared to the Castilian examples, in order to discuss whether attitudes to emotions and emotional display were shared between these two cultures that had been physically adjacent during many centuries, but the difference between which – in dogma and in mentality – is often assumed to be great.

reflection on the history of emotions, and on medieval confession and lay piety. Draft version of my contribution to Miri Rubin, ed, European Religious Cultures

Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History. Umeå, Sweden