Writing in, from, and out of the Eighteenth Century
How do historically-minded critics write timeless stories about human emotion? How can scholars reach the contemporary reading public?
Fritz Breithaupt and Sarah Knott are the authors of two recent, best-selling books and are ideal interlocutors as we ponder these questions. Join us for a few readings, much discussion, and ample celebration.
Sarah Knott (Professor of History and Gender Studies at IU Bloomington) is fundamentally interested in the lived experience of change on many different scales, from the intensely personal to the national and political. Her Mother Is a Verb (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2019) offers both a history of childbearing in Britain and North America and a meditation on time and its fracturing. It has been glowingly reviewed in the London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, etc. and translated into several languages.
Fritz Breithaupt (Provost Professor of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Cognitive Science at IU Bloomington) works on the narrative brain and asks how stories shape behavior, with a focus on cognition, emotion, aesthetics, and morality. His most recent book The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell University Press, 2019) was featured on National Public Radio this past spring; the German edition appeared on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list. He is also the founder of the Experimental Humanities Lab.
The College of Arts