Fritz Breithaupt is Provost Professor at Indiana University Bloomington (USA) where he teaches both in Cognitive Science and Germanic Studies.
In May 2022, his new book Das narrative Gehirn will be published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Among Fritz’ recent publications is his book The Dark Sides of Empathy (Cornell UP, 2019/Suhrkamp, 2017) that examines the cases where empathy fails, lead to immoral favoring of some over others, or stimulate mistreatments as in sadistic empathy and vampiristic empathy. (The German version of the book was listed on the bestseller list in February 2017).
Fritz is also the founding director of the Experimental Humanities Laboratory that studies narratives empirically. Recently, the lab concluded the largest study to date of narrative serial reproduction or more simply telephone games with above 20,000 story retellings.
He is a frequent contributor to the press, including Die Zeit and Philosophie Magazin.