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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Christopher Reed <\/strong>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<\/em> (2011) and co-author, with Christopher Castiglia, of If Memory Serves: AIDS, Gay Men, and the Promise of the Queer Past<\/em> (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<\/em> (2017). Other books include Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity<\/em> (2006) and Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities <\/em>(2017). He is currently working on a book about modern American artists and \u201ckinesthetic empathy\u201d \u2014 that is, the ways our bodies experience perceptions of movement \u2014 and how those dynamics can bring people together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Challenging the European avant-garde’s commitment to aesthetics of alienation, this group of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1626,"featured_media":22063,"template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_bates_event_start":"2026-11-02T16:30","_bates_event_end":"2026-11-02T16:30","_bates_event_rsvp_date":"","_bates_event_building":"Olin Arts Center","_bates_event_room":"","_bates_event_street":"75 Russell Street","_bates_event_city":"Lewiston","_bates_event_state":"ME","_bates_event_zip":"04240","_bates_event_allDay":false,"_bates_event_featured":false,"_bates_event_associated_urls":"","_bates_event_timezone":"","_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"event-tag":[],"class_list":["post-22062","bates_events","type-bates_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"start":"2026-11-02T16:30:00","end":"2026-11-02T16:30:00","location":{"rendered":"
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Lewiston<\/span>, ME<\/span> 04240<\/span><\/div>","simple":" Olin Arts Center, Lewiston, ME, 04240"},"featured_image":{"url":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/files\/2026\/08\/headshot-739x900.webp","id":22063},"structureddata":"