Carolyn J. Dean is Professor of History and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France; Sexuality and Modern Western Culture; and The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject.

"Carolyn Dean brings to bear her impressive skills as an intellectual historian to trace changing attitudes toward the representation of the suffering, vulnerable body. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is a wonderful example of the ways in which a certain kind of close critical reading can open up new perspectives on a field one thinks one knows. Dean takes what seem commonplace observations (the idea, in this case, that our capacity for empathy has been exhausted by the brutalities of genocide and world war) and asks how they operate to create explanations that avoid rather than confront what has happened."

Carolyn J. Dean is Professor of History and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France; Sexuality and Modern Western Culture; and The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject.

"Carolyn Dean brings to bear her impressive skills as an intellectual historian to trace changing attitudes toward the representation of the suffering, vulnerable body. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is a wonderful example of the ways in which a certain kind of close critical reading can open up new perspectives on a field one thinks one knows. Dean takes what seem commonplace observations (the idea, in this case, that our capacity for empathy has been exhausted by the brutalities of genocide and world war) and asks how they operate to create explanations that avoid rather than confront what has happened."

Carolyn J. Dean is Professor of History and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France; Sexuality and Modern Western Culture; and The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject.

"Carolyn Dean brings to bear her impressive skills as an intellectual historian to trace changing attitudes toward the representation of the suffering, vulnerable body. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is a wonderful example of the ways in which a certain kind of close critical reading can open up new perspectives on a field one thinks one knows. Dean takes what seem commonplace observations (the idea, in this case, that our capacity for empathy has been exhausted by the brutalities of genocide and world war) and asks how they operate to create explanations that avoid rather than confront what has happened."