Faculty Perspectives: David Bell

Professor David Bell and Professor Leonard White are leading a Bass Connections project team exploring graceful movements in terms of body mechanics, social cognition and the cultural and aesthetic meanings of grace.

Team members are exploring performance contexts that require an exploration of the limits of movement and acceleration—such as dance, a formal social event or an athletic contest—in order to ask fascinating broader questions: What is graceful movement? And what is grace?

“The Bass Connections experience has been personally very transforming intellectually,” he says, “in ways that are difficult to measure at this point but are percolating all the time. It’s partially changed my research and writing focus. I have a piece coming out on touch and closeness in a collection to be published by the University of Chicago Press, which I never would have written if I hadn’t had this experience. And I’m working on a piece on spatial memory, which is a new area of reflection for me, directly linked to my ongoing interests in neuroscience.”

Read more and learn how you can get involved in Bass Connections.