Literature as Emotional Archive
Monica Hidalgo, junior fellow.
Monica Hidalgo’s work revolves around two central questions: how are stories, memories, and emotions preserved, and how do they shape the way we remember change? These questions are also important for the experiences of rural-urban transformations that TRANSITION attends to. During her stay at the center, Monica is further developing her work on these questions by looking at Nordic literary impressionism: “Novels from this period are more than just fiction. They are time capsules capturing the emotional and atmospheric essence of a historical moment, and, as such, they take on a documentary function as emotional records of social change. They serve as an emotional archive of how it felt to live through the transition to modernity.”
Emotional histories – past and present – make human vulnerability visible. Scholars, archivists, cultural institutions, and broader audiences all can learn from these histories. They preserve fragile emotional worlds and thus serve as records of how people have lived through precarity and displacement.
Monica holds a PhD in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley and now serves as Program Officer for Educational Exchange & Special Projects at the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her visit at TRANSITION thus combines cultural heritage work with academic research. Within this dynamic, she explores literary texts alongside archival traces of precariously situated groups such as rural migrants, the urban poor, servants, itinerant performers, or the institutionalized. As Monica explains: “These communities are often at risk of being erased from cultural memory. At the same time, they were captured with extraordinary precision in Nordic literary impressionism. My goal is to bring these literary impressions together with archival ego-documents to recover forgotten emotional histories.”
Uncovering the forgotten emotional histories of the Nordic transition to modernity holds very important lessons: “Emotional histories – past and present – make human vulnerability visible. Scholars, archivists, cultural institutions, and broader audiences all can learn from these histories. They preserve fragile emotional worlds and thus serve as records of how people have lived through precarity and displacement,” says Monica.
Two experiences have shaped Monica’s work. At the Royal Danish Library, she transcribed and translated an unpublished Herman Bang manuscript. Through this, she discovered how much history actually lives in the margins, in crossed-out lines, in handwritten notes. Alongside this work was her personal journey of living with chronic pain, which shifted how she views time, memory, and vulnerability. Together, these experiences sharpened Monica’s attention to the small, everyday textures of life that Nordic literary impressionism captures: “At its core, my work is about presence: giving shape to experiences that are difficult to name but deeply felt, and showing how literature and archives preserve the emotional history of being human in times of change.”