In the latest book by Vittorio Gallese and Ugo Morelli, Cosa significa essere umani? (‘What Does It Mean to Be Human?’, 2024), it is clarified how the emotions and decision-making abilities of human beings are inseparable from bodily experience. Using the term ‘emotion,’ we are, after all, using a term etymologically linked to the Latin word emovere, meaning ‘to move, to stir up.’ Implicitly, we therefore attribute to the expression of emotions a close connection with the body, which is ‘moved’ by some event that triggers what we define with terms like ‘fear,’ ‘anger,’ ‘joy,’ ‘shame,’ and so forth.

Read More Read more about The Body of Emotions, the Emotions of the Body: Embodied Emotions in Literature

A heart monitoring system gives a straight line and a dull continuous beep. A green point in a radar disappears all of a sudden. A cry fills the void up. There’s an app abruptly unable to localize a phone or a GPS. A train is missing from the arrivals posters. A father is asking over and over to his daughter who she is. There is an article reporting the number of untraceable people after a shipwreck. A picture shows a theatre erased by bombing attacks. An excavation exhumes a statue’s head. A homeless is showing a sign with a request of help: he lost his job. These and other signals and narrations are each responding to a loss which unleash emotions.

Read More Read more about Call for papers. To disappear, to lose, to get lost. Investigating the emotion of absence and missing

Are there emotions tangled with the reporting of the Past? How do they find manifestation, in verbal or nonverbal narration? Which of those emotions move us closer to people recounting their personal past life or unfolding their or other’s collective past? And which are the emotions we feel in the presence of the material ruins of past times, especially when they look abandoned and are subject to decay? Which are the emotions awaken by the cultural heritage and in how far the defence, retrieval and reuse of monuments is aiming at their emotional fruition?

Read More Read more about Call for papers. Emotions from the Past, emotions for the Past

What is the role of emotions in scientific practices, such as observation and experiment, and which role do emotions play in the scientist's ethos?  

Read More Read more about Call for papers. Feeling science

Since ancient times, rhetorical strategies of emotions have been known and practiced. We will, therefore, ask ourselves how literature, in each age, manages to represent, simulate, reproduce and arouse, through written and oral language, the experience of emotion and its cognitive, physiological and psychological bases. Possible subjects for the essays could also concern the performing and visual arts, dance, cinema, and theater and their respective languages. 

Read More Read more about Call for papers. "Ri/sentimenti". Emotions and languages