Too Much Emotion or Not Enough? Empathy and the Public Sphere

Can empathy be taught? What can history teach us about how specific actors cultivate emotions in citizens?

Commentators from across the political spectrum, as well as ordinary citizens, have remarked on what could appear as contradictory trends: on the one hand, feelings seem to be at historic intensity—everyone is very angry, very enthusiastic, very disappointed, very supportive, very worried, or very optimistic; on the other hand, it seems as if many folks can no longer feel anything at all. Both trends seem to suppress compassion for fellow citizens who do not hold one’s own political views or belong to one’s social or ethnic group.

This Humanities for Humans conversation, featuring Jennifer Evans (Professor of History at Carleton University), Suzanne Keen (author of Empathy and the Novel), and moderated by Irene Kacandes, will ask: can democracy survive what we might call the factionalization of empathy? Can traditional alliances survive the negative political rhetoric being hurled across North America and across the Atlantic? Terms like “affect,” “conviviality,” “cruelty,” “empathy,” “kindness,” “solidarity,” and “suffering” will be defined and discussed, shedding light on how feelings get generated by and mobilized through political speech.

Can empathy be taught? What can history teach us about how specific actors cultivate emotions in citizens? What can literature and the arts teach us? What strategies can enhance progress toward solutions that improve life for most people?

This event is in partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation

Biographies

Jennifer Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she researches social media, networked memory, and visual culture. She is currently working on two large-scale, transnational projects, one on photography and the Sexual Revolution and the other on mis- and disinformation across social media and how far-right and populist influencers draw on (and misrepresent) history to make their claims. Her books include Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011) and The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (2023), recently awarded the German Studies Association Prize for Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies. She has co-written Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape with former Carleton students Meghan Lundrigan and Erica Fagen and is involved in several digital projects including the New Fascism Syllabus (www.NewFascismSyllabus.com) and the German Studies Collaboratory (www.GermanStudiesCollaboratory.org). In 2026, she will deliver the George Mosse lectures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on the postwar history of German drag, funded by the Humboldt Foundation’s Adenauer Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Suzanne 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), Narrative Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; rev. 2nd ed. 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). Keen’s work bridges literature, neuroscience, psychology, and emotion science. She is Professor of English at Scripps College, Claremont, California.

Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki), and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Until 2024, she was the Dartmouth Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012) proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter, 2022). Kacandes has held leadership positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter.