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Writing centers are the locus for a wide range of emotional labor on campus, often serving students beyond the typical educational purpose. Naming How We Feel grapples with the question of how writing center administrators account for, train for, and theorize emotion and affect in the writing center to facilitate better and more ethical practices and considers how writing center administrators might ameliorate the costs of such emotional labor to faculty, tutors, and students.

Beginning with a discussion of how writing center scholars might identify and understand emotional labor, the book then expands to examine richly varied case studies and anecdotes to showcase how tutors tend to experience such labor and consider its relationship and association with emotional intelligence and burnout. Lawson considers how the field might better prepare and train tutors for affect and emotional labor, ultimately advocating for more equitable conditions for emotional labor within writing centers.

Naming How We Feel examines the critical role feelings play in writing and writing center work, offering advice on training tutors for emotional labor and literacy and suggestions for how administrators might engage institutional stakeholders to create and support more equitable conditions for emotional labor within their writing centers.

Roman slavery was characterized by pervasive exploitation. Sarah Levin-Richardson here takes the innovative step of examining how emotions and affect functioned in this realm. Taking wetnurses, pedagogues, children, sex laborers, and mourners in turn, Levin-Richardson shows how the skills of enslaved individuals—including managing their own affective states, performing the affect required for a situation (such as grief), and inspiring the desired feelings in others—were resources that could be manipulated for slaveowners’ emotional regulation, social capital, personal pleasure, and monetary benefit. This labor catered to the emotional needs of free people from birth through death while providing enslaved individuals a means to protect family and friends, as well as a potential pathway to upward mobility or freedom. A significant contribution to ancient histories of enslavement, Roman Slavery and Emotional Labor illuminates the pervasive emotional labor performed by enslaved individuals, the reliance of enslavers on this labor, and the opportunities for enslaved people to leverage this labor even in the most extreme conditions.