Department of Germanic Studies

• literature and cognitive science
• empathy
• narrative
• emotions
• German and European literature, philosophy, and culture since 1700
• aesthetics
• intellectual history of money
• Goethe

 

Fritz Breithaupt is Provost Professor of Germanic Studies and Cognitive Science, and adjunct professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. He has published widely on empathy, narrative cognition, and German intellectual history. His latest books are The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell University Press, 2019) and Das narrative Gehirn (The Narrative Brain, forthcoming in English in 2024). The later book was the #1Nonfiction Book in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in August 2022 and is on the shortlist for the academic Book of the Year in Austria. In the book, Fritz presents a model of how we think by means of mini-stories. Such stories, according to Fritz, are structured as short episodes that end with emotions that reward us and thereby release us from the narrative world.

Fritz founded and directs the Experimental Humanities Laboratory to study narratives and narrative cognition empirically. He recently conducted the largest serial reproduction of narrative studies to date, that is telephone game or Stille-Post-Spiel with 12,800 people and almost 20,000 stories. You can read about it in his new book or here. He continues to be highly interested in empathy and especially what blocks and what triggers empathy, including in fiction. His work on Goethe and the romantics, as well as on European literature and philosophy since 1740 is also ongoing.

At Indiana University, he has served as chair of the department, was the director of the West European Studies Institute, was a co-founder of an official EU-Center of Excellence, interim dean of the Hutton Honors College, and served as acting director of several other institutes, such as the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

He has received many honors and distinctions for his work, including an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship, and major grants, including from the Templeton Foundation. He writes frequently for the German press, especially Die Zeit, Zeit Campus, and Der Freitag and he does frequent interviews, including with NPR, BBC, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Deutsche Welle, SWF, SRF, etc. When he is not writing or teaching, he spends time with his family or catches up to his fellow cyclists or plays soccer.