In 2000, Patricia Clough coined the phrase “the affective turn” to refer to a proliferation of scholarly accounts of biological, non-intentional aspects of feeling and human experience. Since then, the interdisciplinary field of affect studies has emerged as an influential subfield in literary studies, particularly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. Situated at the intersection of critical theory, neuroscience, literature, history, and cognitive psychology, affect studies places renewed emphasis on the emotions, which experienced relative marginalization in scholarship in the late twentieth century. The centerpiece of the meeting is an effort to ascertain where we are now in affect studies. Some questions we will consider:

• Why affect now?
• How has affect studies shaped literary studies over the past fifteen years?
• How do cognitive and neuroscientific histories of emotion change our understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture?
• Where does affect studies go from here?

We will begin in the morning by discussing several articles that provide surveys or seminal articulations of affect studies. The Afternoon session will be dedicated to presentations by two Alabama Symposium members:

• Seth Reno, Auburn University at Montgomery: “Intellectual Love and the Affective Turn”
• Danny Siegel, University of Alabama at Birmingham: “Thought on Display in the Land of Feeling: Griffith and Dickens”

For more information: www.alabamasymposium2016.weebly.com.