Daniel Albright
Daniel Albright (October 29, 1945 – January 3, 2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard and the editor of Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. He was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois and completed his undergraduate studies on a full scholarship at Rice in 1967. He received his MPhil in 1969 and PhD in 1970, both from Yale. Albright is also the author of the book Quantum Poetics which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997. He held an NEH fellowship from 1973-1974, was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1976-1977, and more recently, he was a 2012 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Albright began his undergraduate career as a mathematics major, but changed to English literature. Although trained at Yale as a literary critic, after the publication of his book Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg, he was invited by the University of Rochester to come teach there as a kind of liaison between the department of English and the Eastman School of Music. At Rochester, he studied musicology, which forever changed his career. Much of his subsequent work has been on literature and music, culminating with his recent book, Panaesthetics which addresses many arts and examines to what extent the arts are many or are one. He was hired in 2003 in the Harvard departments of English, but later joined the Comparative Literature department and soon began offering courses in the Music department as well.
Positions held
- Assistant Professor, University of Virginia, 1970–75
- Associate Professor, University of Virginia, 1975–81
- Professor, University of Virginia, 1981–87
- Visiting Professor, Universität München, 1986–87
- Professor, University of Rochester, 1987-2003
- Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities, University of Rochester, 1995-2003
- Affiliate, Department of Musicology, Eastman School of Music, 1998-2003
- Professor of English and American Literature and Languages, Harvard University, 2003-2015
- Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University 2004-2015
- Affiliate, Department of Music, Harvard University, 2005-2015
Books
- Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
- Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts. Yale University Press, 2014.
- Evasions Sylph Editions Cahiers, 2012.
- Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song. Eastman Studies in Music, 2009.
- Musicking Shakespeare Eastman Studies in Music, 2007.
- Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Berlioz's Semi-Operas: Roméo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. University of Rochester Press, 2001.
- Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Editor, W. B. Yeats: The Poems. J. M. Dent and Sons, 1990. Revised third printing, 1994.
- Editor and Translator (with Heinz Vienken), Amerikanische Lyrik: Texte und Deutungen. Peter Lang Verlag, 1989.
- Stravinsky: The Music-Box and the Nightingale. Gordon and Breach, 1989.
- Editor, Poetries of America: Essays in the Relation of Character to Style, by Irvin Ehrenpreis. University Press of Virginia, 1988.
- Tennyson: The Muses' Tug-of-War. University Press of Virginia, 1986.
- Lyricality in English Literature. University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
- Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg. University of Chicago Press, 1981.
- Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, Mann. University of Chicago Press, 1978.
- The Myth against Myth: A Study of Yeats's Imagination in Old Age. Oxford University Press, 1972.