Jason Kass

Senior Lecturer, Department of Art, College of Arts & Humanities

Dr. Kass's scholarship and creative practice are rooted in curiosity around the psychology of artistic production and consumption. His doctoral work developed a model for integrating ideas and methods from within the fields of art practice, art theory, and experimental psychology, applying existing empirical findings to established narratives within modern and contemporary art. During that time, he contributed to a novel study at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London that utilized eye tracking and qualitative methods to examine the spectatorship of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which has been theorized extensively.

He continues to work with a team of researchers based in the United Kingdom to explore the cognitive and affective aspects of art spectatorship, most recently co-authoring a study on the role of visual exploration (how we look at an artwork) in mediating the influence of individual personality traits on aesthetic responses in a gallery setting.