Museum of Art

Challenging the European avant-garde’s commitment to aesthetics of alienation, this group of American modernist painters explored the physical sensations of connection among bodies and with landscapes that 19th-century philosophers and 20th-century neuroscientists called “kinesthetic empathy.”  This talk explores the ways that kinesthetic empathy intersects with Queer Theory to promote unruly forms of affiliation. 

Christopher Reed is Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at Penn State University, where he directs the interdisciplinary PhD program in Visual Studies. His scholarship and teaching engage with a wide range of modern art and design with an eye to ways that visual culture has expressed and sustained subcultural identities. Reed is the author of Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (2011) and co-author, with Christopher Castiglia, of If Memory Serves: AIDS, Gay Men, and the Promise of the Queer Past (2012). With Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Reed co-edited the anthology Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture (2017).  Other books include Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2006) and Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (2017). He is currently working on a book about modern American artists and “kinesthetic empathy” — that is, the ways our bodies experience perceptions of movement — and how those dynamics can bring people together.