Issues of animism, animation and empathy as applied in artifacts, as well as in art and architectural texts, engage the dissertation of Spyros Papapetros, a graduate student in an ad hoc interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in “theory and historiography of art and architecture.” Titled On the Animation of the Inorganic: ‘Life in Movement’ in the Art and Architecture of Modernity, the dissertation investigates its topic from a variety of critical angles– art history, social and intellectual history, ethnography and psychoanalysis–and argues that while empathy, a capacity for identification with the external world, was fundamentally repressed by modernist egos, it returned metamorphically projected, objectified and finally reified into the inorganic form of the “animistic” artifacts of twentieth century modernism. Spyros Papetros holds a Chacellor ’s Dissertation Fellowship during his tenure as a Townsend Fellow.