Mobility in History Volume 6, 2015: 63–69 © Mobility in History ISSN: 2296-0503 (Print) ISSN: 2050-9197 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78238-814-2 doi: 10.3167/mih.2015.060107 Feeling Motion Revisiting Mobility History through Affect and Emotion Mikkel Thelle Aarhus University Moving around in the field of mobility history, one finds a certain resilience in its core subjects. While mobility research integrates and digests results from a number of other disciplines—tourism studies, migration studies, and architecture, for exam- ple—it does so without losing its focus on transport modes and practices. It seems, though, that mobility research thrives and grows most when fed perspectives from the wider academic Umwelt. Reviewing the recent workshop Feeling Space: Towards a History of Emotion, Affect and Space, held at the University of Copenhagen in De- cember 2013, this article will suggest that emergent historical research in emotion and affect represents a potentially productive addition to mobility history. 1 Why mention this event in a T 2 M yearbook? For starters, mobility issues shaped the event itself. The week of the workshop a storm disrupted all train and flight traffic in Denmark. As a result, participants were delayed in stations and airports, joining the discussions in Copenhagen throughout the event at almost rhythmic intervals. So, before it even began, a natural occurrence had shaped the event and given it a rhythm. A similar motion will guide this text as it moves in and out of the workshop in order to use it as a platform for gazing around the field of mobility and cultural history. Of course, a Danish storm is not the sole reason for bringing this theme to the yearbook. I will argue that the workshop’s focus on the analytic landscape of feeling offers an exciting new approach for mobility historians to consider. The concepts and perspectives developed within affect theory and history of emo- tions could inspire historians of transport and mobility to look for novel ways to understand their subjects, as they have already been inspired by cultural geogra- 1. The Feeling Space workshop notice has been taken down, but the details are cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://saxoinstitute.ku.dk/brea kingbonds/activities/workshop_saxo-institute/.