School of Advanced Study Emotion, Memory & the Mind Mass Observing Emotion in Post-War Britain Claire Langhamer (Professor of Modern British History, University of Sussex) This paper has two objectives: one is methodological and the other is empirical. First it explores the issues at stake in accessing feelings in the past. How do historians ‘get at’ emotion and what feeling evidence is available to us? Here I am particularly interested in identifying sources that allow access to the feelings of ‘ordinary’ people and to the messiness of everyday emotional life. I will focus in particular upon the material generated by the British social investigative organization – Mass Observation – in the middle years of the twentieth century. In the second part of the paper I will demonstrate how a small sample of this Mass Observation material – discursive responses to open ended questionnaires sent to a panel of volunteer writers in May and August 1945 – can be used to enhance our understanding of the British transition from war to peace. Specifically I will use Mass Observation sources to illuminate the work that emotion did, and was called upon to do in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. I’m particularly interested in how the interlinked categories of feeling and experience were deployed as ways of knowing the world in 1945 - and as grounds for participating in an increasingly dynamic public sphere. As Feminist scholars have long noted, ‘power circulates through feeling.’ This paper forms part of a broader project on ‘emotional democracy’ in which I want to think about ‘ordinary’ people’s understanding of the status and power of emotion – and of their own position as emotional citizens – within public life after 1945. The Human Mind Project in collaboration with University of Sussex Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science