This interdisciplinary course examines the strange and strained relationship between art and empathy. Cultivating empathy is often invoked as a worthwhile moral purpose for engaging art, literature, and the humanities in general. This course explores (and explodes) this assumption while studying the history of empathy as both a moral and aesthetic concept as it evolves appears from the Enlightenment period to the current moment. How do artworks and literature enhance our understanding of empathy or activate our suspicions of it as a moral idea? How does empathy as an aesthetic concept that theorizes how bodily experiences can be projected onto others help us rethink new modes of belonging and more critical modes of reflecting? This course engages texts from across various disciplines such as art history, literary criticism, medical humanities, dance criticism and philosophy to analyze how ideas circulating around the term "empathy" have generated questions concerning the nature of healing, learning/teaching, and political mobilizing. We will think about these various theoretical ideas by placing them in conversation with literature and art that emerged from writers and artists from the Black diaspora. As a moral and political idea, empathy has been stridently critiqued by various theorists in Black Studies as a moral shortcut that undercuts political engagement. We will think about how these disparate ideas and critiques of empathy can open conversations onto the ways art and literature activate our embodied, cognitive, and affective participation with the objects we share together.
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit · GER: WAY-A-II
This interdisciplinary course examines the strange and strained relationship between art and empathy. Cultivating empathy is often invoked as a worthwhile moral purpose for engaging art, literature, and the humanities in general. This course explores (and explodes) this assumption while studying the history of empathy as both a moral and aesthetic concept as it evolves appears from the Enlightenment period to the current moment. How do artworks and literature enhance our understanding of empathy or activate our suspicions of it as a moral idea? How does empathy as an aesthetic concept that theorizes how bodily experiences can be projected onto others help us rethink new modes of belonging and more critical modes of reflecting? This course engages texts from across various disciplines such as art history, literary criticism, medical humanities, dance criticism and philosophy to analyze how ideas circulating around the term "empathy" have generated questions concerning the nature of healing, learning/teaching, and political mobilizing. We will think about these various theoretical ideas by placing them in conversation with literature and art that emerged from writers and artists from the Black diaspora. As a moral and political idea, empathy has been stridently critiqued by various theorists in Black Studies as a moral shortcut that undercuts political engagement. We will think about how these disparate ideas and critiques of empathy can open conversations onto the ways art and literature activate our embodied, cognitive, and affective participation with the objects we share together.
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.