Dr. Sarah Mesle

Professor of Writing at USC
Current Visiting Senior Lecturer in English at Yale

Reasons, Feelings, and Close Teaching: Writing that Matters in an Era of Artificial Empathy

Friday, October 9, 12-1pm

Chase Lounge

With an additional conversation and reading with Professor Jaed Coffin at 4:14pm in Pettingill G52

Prior to the lecture, there will be refreshments available beginning at 11:30 am. Attendees are also welcome to bring lunch from the Den or bring your own lunch from home.

Humanities writing classes are full of feeling. Whether we’ve recognized it or not, navigating the structures of how writing feels has always been a skill we’ve taught. This talk proposes that such skills are some of the most valuable forms of expertise that humanists can provide in our current technological moment. Companies like OpenAI take their name from the marketing term “artificial intelligence.” But judging from their commercials, a better name for what they sell might be artificial empathy. To students facing an overwhelming world—a world of political and economic upheaval, environmental calamity, educational expense, and (according to ads) stressful first dates—OpenAI offers certainty, accomplishment, and the promise of enduring support. Students aren’t dumb to seek out those consolations. But humanists are uniquely positioned to help students realize how the empathetic optimism on offer from “AI” might be inherently cruel.  By emphasizing how critical thinking and feeling combine, we can help writing students recognize the worth of embodied intellectual, social, and political relationships that may sometimes feel difficult, but offer us a world of support that’s real. 

Later that same afternoon, at 4:15, in the Keck classroom (G52, Pettingill), Dr. Mesle will be in conversation with our department’s visiting associate professor of creative nonfiction, Jaed Coffin, about and reading from Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Pleasure, Power, and Complicity , a work of nonfiction that showcases Dr. Mesle’s more public facing humanities writing and her work as a lauded pop culture critic in LARB and other venues.

Dr. Sarah Mesle is Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California and Senior Lecturer in English at Yale University for Fall 2026. Dr. Mesle is the author of Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Pleasure, Power, and Complicity (Beacon Press,  2026). She’s an editor at Large at the Los Angeles Review of Books and editor and co-founder of the LARB Channel Avidly and the NYU Press short book series Avidly Reads. Her writing has appeared in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, InStyle, Studies in American Fiction, Guernica, and the New York Times Magazine. 

Formally known as the Emily Carroll ’99 Carleton English Guest Lecture, this college event is funded by the King Family Charitable Lead Trust in honor of the positive experiences of Emily Carleton ’99 at Bates College, and also her graduation from the institution. This fund will, at the discretion of the English department, support guest lecturers on campus for the benefit of Bates students and faculty.