The College of Liberal Art and Social Sciences (CLASS) of CityU has set up CLASS Advanced Methods School (CAMS) in 2022 to serve as an avenue to equip researchers and students of CLASS and beyond with conceptual and technical competency deemed essential for theoretical and empirical inquiries. For more than a month, a series of events including a keynote speech, modules, training workshops and publication seminars were organised to provide rigorous, cutting-edge and multi-method training for faculty members, research staff and postgraduate students at CityU. 

This summer, CAMS has returned in June 2023 and brought together esteemed methodologists worldwide to facilitate transnational academic exchange amongst scholars around the world, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration across departments within CLASS and beyond, in particular for interdisciplinary research projects. On 23 June, Prof David FREEDBERG, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art at Columbia University, was invited to give worldwide audience a keynote speech titled “Empathy and Access in a Digital World” online. 

At the beginning of the seminar, Prof CHENG Shuk-han, Associate Vice-President (Research) of CityU welcomed all participants by introducing CAMS and the four research clusters under CLASS, namely One Health, Digital Society, Smart City and Brain, highlighting CityU’s persistent efforts in pursuit of interdisciplinary, problem-driven research projects to benefit society. Dean of CLASS Prof Richard M WALKER then greeted everyone and presented a brief introduction of CAMS 2023 which brings participants wide-ranging research topics by incorporating three components emphasising on research design, method training, and practical toolkits. Prof Christine HUANG Yi-hui, Associate Dean (Faculty and Research) of CLASS introduced the background of the keynote speaker, Prof David Freedberg, who is a world-renowned historian of art and best-known for his work on psychological responses to art.

In the keynote speech, Prof Freedberg led audience into the world of classical western paintings, architecture and sculptures, in order to examine the accessibility of arts across cultures. For decades studying the Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian 17th century art, as well as in historiographical and theoretical areas, his great knowledge of art history in the west enabled him to give plenty of examples to show the positive relations between vision, embodiment, movement and emotion. He cited works of Romantic and Renaissance painters like Francisco GOYA and Paolo VERONESE to discuss with participants the elements that caught people’s attention and what made people notice in a work of art regardless of cultural upbringing. 

Prof Freedberg also compared monkey brain with human brain to demonstrate the similarity found in the mirror neuron system in both brains. The study of automatic empathetic responses and the phantom limb experiment implied that new cognitive neurosciences offer important therapeutic possibilities of the observation of movement and emotion in works of art. Although advanced technology can replicate artworks by Artificial Intelligence (AI), photography and 3D laser printing, etc., Prof Freedberg’s study showed that motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitude of seeing a photograph is less than that of seeing a real painting. In the concluding remark, Prof Freedberg believed that advanced digital techniques such as AI would never substitute for the human hand because the mistakes and attempts at reproducing reality by human would not be incorporated by AI. 

The fascinating keynote speech was engaging and aroused interesting discussion among audience. It also demonstrated a good example of an interdisciplinary research involving the study of neuroscience, art, history and digital technology. To know more about CAMS, please click here for updates and past activities.

For those who have missed the event, please watch the recording here.