Emotion Commotion on Election Eve

The minute-to-minute horse-race commentary will then be at its oversaturated peak. The aim of this event is neither prediction nor familiar punditry, but a broader perspective on the emotions that have inflected American political pivots, past and present.

Emotions, just like politics, have particular histories and take particular shapes. What emotional twists does the current election reveal? What can we learn from the history of emotions and elections? And what is or isn’t peculiar to the United States?  

This programme is organised by the America in the World research group, which is a part of the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies.   

About the speakers   

George Blaustein is Senior Lecturer of American Studies and History at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a founder and editor of The European Review of Books, a multilingual magazine of culture and ideas. His essays have appeared in n+1, The New Republic, The New Yorker, De Groene Amsterdammer, and Vrij Nederland, among other places. Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction (Oxford University Press), a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th Century, appeared in 2018. 

Katy Hull is Assistant Professor of Modern Gender History in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her first book was The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton University Press, 2021). Her current research project investigates the construction of emotions in New Left activist autobiographies. 

Jack Thompson is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the influence of political culture on US grand strategy, efforts to rebalance the transatlantic relationship, the history of US conservatism, the radicalization of the US right, and democratic backsliding. His 2019 book, Great Power Rising: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of US Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press), won the 2020 Theodore Roosevelt Association Book Prize.  

Mario Daniels (moderator) is the DAAD-Fachlektor of Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. He is a historian of the international history of science and technology. He received his PhD from the University of Tübingen, taught at the Universities of Tübingen and Hannover and was twice a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. From 2015 to 2020 he was DAAD Visiting Professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University.