Fritz Breithaupt

Fritz Breithaupt is a humanities scholar and cognitive scientist whose work explores narrative communication, empathy, and transformative experiences across cultures. He is chair of the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, a member of MindCORE, and a member of the Graduate Group in Psychology. His book The Narrative Brain (Yale University Press, 2025) won Austria’s official Science Book of the Year award. His research examines how communication allows people to co-experience the lives of others, but also how empathy can misfire and intensify polarization, see his The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell University Press, 2019). He is a Humboldt Fellow, an annual guest professor at the HSG in Switzerland, where he teaches “empathic leadership,” and a frequent contributor to public media, including Die ZEIT, NPR, the BBC, and Der Spiegel. At Penn, he directs the Experimental Humanities Laboratory, which studies storytelling through multidisciplinary empirical methods.