Kristen Loutensock

     Kristen Loutensock is an academic and writer whose work interrogates how autism and empathy circulate within popular culture. She received her MA and PhD from UC Berkeley and her BA from UC Davis, and she has taught at San Francisco State University, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, and UW Madison.

            While in residence at The Growlery, Kristen will be working on two book manuscripts (tentatively entitled Spectacles of Difference: Empathy and Autism in American Visual Culture and Defective Detectives: PTSD, Gender, and Disability in Television Serials) as well as completing articles on music and authenticity in Rain Man, the history of the ‘refrigerator mother,’ and closed-loop analytical practice. She is also at work on a larger project that re-examines how spectacle and narrative are rooted in the grand narratives of Marxism, Darwinism, and psychoanalysis.