The Elements series on the histories of emotions and senses owes everything to the vision and dedication of Jan Plamper, who established the series. He seeded the series with projects that uplifted the field and drove it forward critically, establishing it as the key location for theoretical and methodological development, and giving a platform for case studies that would have been diminished in a shorter format. We therefore received the series in rude health, and with exciting prospects ahead.

Even before we took on the role, we shared a feeling that this series was easing our joint intellectual frustration at the stalling of critical dialogue in the field. The history of emotions and the history of the senses have both exploded in the last two decades, in terms of sheer quantity of publications, but few works really moved the needle on the foundational conception of what these fields were, how to practice within them, and how they interacted with the field at large. Jan’s masterstroke was to understand that the history of emotions and senses were not two fields, but one – a point that two of us capitalised on in our own Element (Emotion, Sense, Experience), produced under Jan’s editorship. This braiding and its future implications are key themes that we wish to see develop in the coming years.

The Elements platform really suits the task. In terms of space, it allows for far more expansiveness than a journal article. It has thoroughly revived the value of the scholarly essay, as well as supplying a much needed space for theoretical exploration and innovative interdisciplinary and conceptual work. The series is thematically open enough to capture diverse projects that are nonetheless directly related to one another, and this relatedness becomes clearly visible when looking at the series as a whole. The prospects for reading across historical periods and across disciplinary lines, that is, for the cross pollination of the field, are most encouraging.

To that end, we see the series becoming more diverse in terms of its strengths in different periods, particularly the medieval and the ancient, and in terms of its global coverage. A top priority is to accelerate the disruption of the European and North American centredness of the field, a process that remains nascent. It seems inevitable to us that the confrontation of western modernity with non-western and pre-modern approaches must also drive theoretical and methodological development, and we are certain that this is necessary. Our field is incredibly rich in breadth and depth but it can sometimes feel like three, four or five separate subfields, closed to one another. The history of emotions, senses and experience does not require one set of tools for Anglophone modernity and another set of tools for other times, other places, other languages. The tools that we all need require collective thought. Under the Elements umbrella, through substantial critical exchange, we hope for major strides in methodological coherency and maturity.