Peter Stearns Gives Graduate Master Class at HSE St Petersburg

The new session of the Department’s traditional graduate master class series met on December 13, 2014. Doctoral students had a unique opportunity to meet professor Peter Stearns (George Mason University, Washington, D.C.), editor and founder of the Journal of Social History. 

The session explored current trends and developments in cultural history.

As one of the founders of cultural history, Dr. Stearns is uniquely positioned to give precisely such a broad overview of its inception, separation from social history, and main features, as he did at the beginning of the meeting.

On the one hand, by addressing aspects ignored by social history, such as values and beliefs, the cultural turn made our understanding of seemingly familiar phenomena deeper and more wholesome. Moreover, it expanded the domain of historical research with such subfields as history of the senses and emotions that change our understanding of the past in profound ways. With the help of history of emotions the scholar can historicize the emotion that is now taken for granted, such as shame, and explore the historicity of its appearance, articulation, and changes to its semantics.

But the cultural turn has not been without its drawbacks. One such problem, in Dr. Stearns’ view is excessive emphasis on semantic interpretation that moves the scholar away from history and social sciences in general.

The discussion that followed addressed various approaches to doing cultural history and history of emotions as well as the prospects of these fields in the contemporary academic landscape.  Thanks to the active stance of the students, pertinent and detailed comments of Professor Stearns and department chair Dr. Alexander Semyonov, the graduate master class session with Dr. Stearns was intense, highly informative, warm and friendly.