Editor's Introduction

This special issue of the journal was conceived in 2015 when the Stout Centre at Victoria University of Wellington held a conference on 'The History of Emotions'. The history of emotions is a new, but rapidly expanding, field of scholarly enquiry across the humanities and social sciences. Internationally, for example, it has drawn together social/cultural historians with historians of science and medicine. Reflecting this interdisciplinary engagement various participants in the 2015 conference discussed human-animal relationships and animal emotions, both of which are particularly apposite in the context of a New Zealand economy heavily dependent upon the rural pastoral sector. The first six articles in this issue therefore respond to a diverse set of questions and contexts in the history of emotions.