GROUPMINDS at the “Cognition and Emotion in Ancient Historical Writing” Conference (Athens, November 2025)

We are pleased to report that our post-doc researcher Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou represented the GROUPMINDS project at the international conference Cognition and Emotion in Ancient Historical Writing, which was held on 17–18 November 2025, at The Danish Institute at Athens (DIA).

 “Exploring the internal dynamics of collective emotions in ancient narratives: the case of the Riot on the Statues (4th c. A.D.)”

In her paper, Kyriakoula explored how collective emotions emerge, spread, and intensify when a community faces a severe crisis. Focusing on the 387 A.D. “Riot on the Statues” in Antioch, she used the homilies of John Chrysostom to show how communal affectivity could be narrated, manipulated, and mobilized — revealing how emotions helped shape collective identity, social cohesion, or division during times of upheaval. As she argues, collective emotional life in the ancient world is not just passive or spontaneous, but socially mediated, synchronized, and actively shaped by rhetoric and shared narratives. This work resonates deeply with GROUPMINDS’s broader interest in group cognition, social affect, and collective mentalities.

The conference — bringing together leading scholars of cognition, emotion, and historiographical writing — explicitly aimed to rethink the relationship between thought and feeling in ancient historiography, and to challenge old dichotomies between “cold cognition” and “hot emotion.” By participating, GROUPMINDS contributed to a cutting-edge debate about how ancient authors constructed communal mental and emotional worlds — thereby expanding our project’s reach beyond narrative theory into the broader terrain of affective history.

We congratulate Kyriakoula for this excellent contribution and are proud to see GROUPMINDS represented among an exciting roster of international voices working at the intersection of cognition, emotion, and ancient narrative.