Professing Passion:Emotion in the Scholarship of Professors at Research Universities

Abstract

Interviews with 40 recently tenured university professors indicated that scholarly work is emotional in content; it draws on scholars’ emotional resources. Yet, discourse about scholarship’s personal and emotional meanings is uncommon, given historic separations (reified in university policy) between emotional and cognitive work and between personal and professional endeavors. This study blurs such distinctions by portraying academic work as anchored in a concept of “passionate thought”: as discrete and bounded peak experiences and as contextualization of these peak experiences in broader emotional processes, interactions, and remembrance. The study’s contributions include its representation of scholarly learning as emotional in content and as emotionally contextualized (and thereby as emotionally complex) and its implications for reform of policy discourses to account for the personal content of scholarly work.