Pleasure and Form: Chasing Imagination

Pleasure and Form: Chasing Imagination

Gabrielle Starr (English, New York University, author of Feeling Beauty)
Friday, May 13, 2016 / 10:45 AM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This talk is the Keynote Address for the IHC Conference The Humanities, the Neurosciences, and the Brain.

Gabrielle Starr is a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and of aesthetics, as well as a researcher in experimental aesthetics, using the tools of cognitive neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and the humanities together, to explore the contours of aesthetic experience. Her first book, Lyric Generations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), is a history of the interrelation of lyric poetry and the early British novel, in which she argues for the need to understand the history of changes in literary form as emerging from cross-generic interactions. More recently she has engaged in empirical and theoretical work in aesthetics. Her most recent book is Feeling Beauty (MIT Press, 2013), and it explores the ways our responses to the Sister Arts of painting, poetry and music are mediated by brain-based reward processes and by the default mode network. This work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the form of a New Directions Fellowship to facilitate training in neuroscience, as well as by an NSF-ADVANCE grant (jointly with Nava Rubin) at NYU. She is currently director of a three-year, collaborative international project on brain responses to music, painting, and literary imagery.

Sponsored by the IHC series Humanities and the Brain.