Interdisciplinary approaches to narrative empathy

Societies and Cultures Institute (SCI)

This masterclass led by scholar, author and poet, Suzanne Keen, is hosted by the Societies &amp; Cultures Institute.

Wellcome Centre boardroom, Queen's Building

In this masterclass Suzanne Keen briefly reflects on a recent 3-year collaboration of 15 empathy scholars (philosophers, psychologists, primatologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, experts on reading, and literary scholars) and how they arrived at an agreement about 8 lower-order constructs relating to empathy. You will learn about emotional congruence; sympathy/compassion; personal distress; perspective taking; accurate inference; mimicry/synchrony; projection; and transportation as method. The session offers participants an opportunity to discuss how this more precise vocabulary might assist in developing/refining clear and concise interdisciplinary research methods.Please note, this event is for University of Exeter PGRs and ECRs only.BioSuzanne Keen writes about narrative empathy and the impact of immersion reading. Best known for Empathy and the Novel (Oxford, 2007), she is the author of Empathy and Reading: Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader (Routledge, 2022); Thomas Hardy’s Brains (Ohio State, 2014; short-listed for the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa); Narrative Form (Palgrave Macmillan 2003; rev. and expanded 2nd edition 2015); Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001); Victorian Renovations of the Novel (Cambridge, 1998); and a volume of poetry, Milk Glass Mermaid (Lewis-Clark, 2007). Her affective and cognitive studies combine expertise in the novel and narrative theory with interests in neuroscience, developmental and social psychology, and emotion science. Keen’s work on readers’ empathy has made an impact in fields far beyond English literature, including in the health professions, medical humanities, legal studies, business, computer science (human-computer interaction and robotics), environmental studies, food studies, the science of teaching and learning, screenwriting, film and media studies, and gender studies. Her interdisciplinary collaborations/affiliations include: University of Michigan’s SciFusion initiative; the University of Durham’s Narrative and Cognition Lab; Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Charles University in Prague, University of Copenhagen, and Palacký University in Olomouc’s “Language(s) of Love: Literature as the Body of Reconciliation” (based on her work); and documentary film artist’s Compassion in Action project (subject-matter expert). Between 2012 and 2018 she coedited (with Emma Parker) the Oxford University Press journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing. Her literary writing is represented by Emma Bal of the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency. She serves as Professor of English at Scripps College (Claremont, California).