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Professor

• Affiliation(s)

  • Director, Institute for the Humanities, Professor of History of Art, Professor of Comparative Literature, College of LSA and Professor of Art & Design, School of Art & Design

• Fields of Study

  • Philosophical aesthetics of Film, Television, Visual Art, Architecture, Music, study of contemporary culture and politics, interest in the project of the essay

• About

  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 UM 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 (1991-2) 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 during 2012.  Current projects include Live Action Heritage, a book of six chapters about heritage in colonial/Victorian times, and the moral, artistic, social and political urgencies around global rewritings of the past into a heritage today. Chapters range over Africa, India and the United States. They consider the logic or grammar of “live action heritage” and treat this as a window into art and politics. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include graduate seminars on Literature and the Other Arts, Literature, Memory and Trauma, and Literature and Philosophical Aesthetics.  

  Languages: Reading knowledge of German and French

  Select Publications:

  • 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.