"Emotional Communities." Connected in Spirit and Emotion

Emotions are a key element in the formation of communities. According to Sara Ahmed, they “surfac[e] ... individual and collective bodies," by "mediat[ing] the relationship between the psychic and the social," and in doing so, they connect "bodily space with social space" ("Collective Feelings" 26ff). Analyzing Rebecca Ackroyd's Period Drama and Samson Young's situated listening, it will be shown how art transforms individual experiences into collective experiences and further how it binds an emotional community by employing a shared emotional repertoire.

After having completed her vocational training as women’s tailor and fashion designer, Katerina Steffan worked as a fashion designer in Hannover for three and a half years. She then started studying at the Leibniz Universität Hannover beginning with English and History (fächerübergreifender Bachelor). While continuing her teacher training in her masters she also studied Advanced Anglophone Studies and graduated in October 2021. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Leibniz Universität Hannover, working on her dissertation entitled "Vulnerable Bodies: Anger and Sorrow in New England Puritanism" which is supported with a fellowship by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Katerina is a member of the DFG-funded early Americanist network "Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600–1865" of the University Duisburg-Essen and she is associate researcher of the "DFG Research Training Group – The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics" of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Her work merges theories of practice, affect, and space and examines the intersection of emotions, the body and space and thus her project elaborates on the dynamic relationality between representations, practices and identities.