The academic seminar as emotional community

Abstract

This article will discuss historical ideas about the modern academic research seminar. My perspective will be that of the history of emotions. The study is introduced by an extensive account of the emergence of the seminar at German universities in the mid-1700s. I will discuss the actual seminars established, beginning with the first, in Göttingen by philologist Gottlob Heyne, going on to that of his student Friedrich August Wolf in Halle, and ending with the foundation of the Berlin University with Wilhelm von Humboldt as executor. In all these contexts, new ideas concerning the seminar were important. In the next step, I will use historian Barbara Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities to analyse one of the most central documents relating to the initial conception of the modern seminar, namely Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1808 Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn. I give a detailed account of Schleiermacher's argument while showing how the text envisions a new community in which emotions play an all-important role as an integrating force. I also show how the ideas expressed in Gelegentliche Gedanken are part both of a general pattern of emotional history and of a specific development, often described as an affective turn, that emerged during the late 1700s. In that process, the feeling of love was particularly important, and my discussion will show that Schleiermacher's text is a part of the affective turn in this respect.