This seminar broadly explores two premises: (l) that sentiments articulate the personal and the political in historically specific ways; and (2) that sentiments are historically situated relationalities with specific genealogies. They have temporalities, rhythms that are far from uniform; durable, recursive, short-lived. One central focus in on sentiment as an index of relations of power and as a tracer of them. This is an adisciplinary seminar, Anthropology is one of many sites of inquiry and a resource, but it is not a priority. We’ll draw on varied literatures from history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, and literary criticism and address approaches to sentiment, feeling, emotion and affect with varied vocabularies and political commitments. Histories of sentiment and emotion are particularly hard to track because the vocabularies do not stay constant, they may cover different gradations, or stay the same.