Speaker: Daniel Herwitz, Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor, University of Michigan

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. His forthcoming book, Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Post-colony 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.