Daniel Alan Herwitz

Daniel Herwitz received the Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Chicago in 1984 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2002.  He is the author of The Star as Icon (Columbia Press, October 2008), Key Concepts in Aesthetics (Continuum Press, 2008), Race and Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Husain (Tata Press in India, 1987). He has also published Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie, a book of essays co-edited with Ashutosh Varshney of the University of Michigan for University of Michigan Press, November 2008, Action, Art, History: Critical Engagements with Arthur Danto, Columbia University Press, March 2007, edited with Michael Kelly, and The Don Giovanni Moment, Columbia University Press, edited with Lydia Goehr, Columbia University Press, 2006. Additional publications include articles on a wide range of topics in philosophy, film studies, visual studies, avant-garde music, literature, and architecture. Herwitz won a National Book Award in India for Husain. He was Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1991-92) also courtesy of the ACLS, and Andrew Mellon Visitor Scholar at the University of Cape Town (2010). He has been invited to be a fellow at the Australian National University in 2012.  His forthcoming book, Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony explores the role of heritage formation in South Africa, India, and the United States, treating that particular rewriting of the past as a window into moral, artistic, social, and political urgencies (Columbia Press, August 2012). Teaching interests in comparative literature include graduate seminars on literature and the other arts; literature, memory, and trauma; and literature and philosophical aesthetics.

Fields of Writing: Aesthetics of Film and Media including new technologies, Visual Art, Architecture, Music, study of contemporary culture and politics, interest in the project of the essay

Languages: Reading knowledge of German and French

Select Publications:

• “World Cup Finale on Long Street”, invited essay for Africa’s World Cup, University of the Michigan Press, volume editor Peter Alessi, forthcoming.

• “The Curator’s Hand and the Creator’s Imprint”, in Curature, Carolyn Hamilton and Pippa Skotnes editors, Jacana Press, Cape Town, forthcoming.  

• “Finding Rabbi Marshak in Post-War America”, in Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael P. Steinberg, Idith Zertal editors, Thinking Jewish Modernity, forthcoming.

• Homecoming, a short story, Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 2007.

• Migration, a short story, Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 2005.

• “Skeptical Pictures in the Music of Company,” in Beckett and Visual Arts, ed. Lois Oppenheim, Garland Press, 1999.

• “Modernism at the Margins,” Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. H. Judin and I. Vladislavic, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998.

• “Camp,” co-authored with Lucia Saks, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998.

• “Pleasure,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998.

• “John Cage,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998.

• “Bringing Words Out of the American Simulacrum: A Free Exercise in Wittgensteinian Critique,” in Borders, Exiles and Diasporas, ed. Elazar Barkan, for Stanford University Press Series Cultural Sitings, 1998.

• “John Cage’s Approach to the Global,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Perloff and Junkermann, University of Chicago Press, 1994; Reprinted in Poetry Criticism,
Vol. 58, 2004, pp. 209-217.

• “The Security of the Obvious: On John Cage’s Radicalism about Music,” Critical Inquiry, Summer 1988.