In one of his novels, Milan Kundera suggested that "love is a continual interrogation." What is this thing called love? Is it, as Shakespeare might have it, "the star to every wandering bark"? Or, in Bronzino's words, "always a fountain and a vase of tears"? Can love be considered a single emotion? A complex of different feelings? An epiphenomenon of neurochemistry? How might we distinguish between parental love, romantic love, and other types of love? What can history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, poetry, and other disciplines teach us about love? In this roundtable, our participants will interrogate love, and, perhaps, in the encounter, be interrogated by it. 

Participants:

Andrea Bayer has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, first in the Department of Prints and Photographs, and, from 1990, in the Department of European Paintings. There she has been involved in numerous exhibitions, most recently The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (2011), and Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (2012). She has written extensively on north Italian painting of the Renaissance, including two Museum Bulletins on painting north of the Apennines (2003 and 2005) and a chapter on the arts of Brescia and Bergamo in Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance: Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humfrey. Dr. Bayer has been a Curator in the Department of European Paintings since 2007 and was the Coordinating Curator for Curatorial Studies, the graduate program run by the Metropolitan Museum and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU from 2007-2012. She is currently at work on a group of special projects connected with the re-launch of the Museum's website in 2012 and other initiatives related to the visitor's experience.

Lucy L. Brown is a Clinical Professor in Neurology at Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental/Physiological Psychology from NYU in 1973. During a post-doctoral fellowship at Einstein, she worked on visualizing dopamine neurons and testing their plasticity in reward systems in animals. She also learned about brain mapping techniques during the fellowship, and continued at Einstein as a grant-funded investigator. She was Director of the Laboratory for Functional Neuroanatomy and Movement Disorders for over twenty years. Currently, she collaborates with several other investigators on brain imaging of romantic love and personality traits, in addition to studying mobility and cognition in normal aging.

Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic(1994). Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. She is the 2012-2014 Poet Laureate of New York State.

Fred Sander has been teaching and practicing psychoanalysis and family therapy since graduating from Albert Einstein Medical School in 1963. He is currently an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute Psychotherapy Program. A charter member of the American Academy of Family Therapy, he is the author of Individual and Family Therapy: Toward an Integration, and editor of Created in Our Own Images. He and his wife will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary later this year.

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