“The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.”
— Marcel Proust
David M. Hertz
Professor of Comparative Literature
Indiana University Bloomington
David Michael Hertz is professor and chair of Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. His recent book, Eugenio Montale, The Fascist Storm and the Jewish Sunflower, is an exploration of the interconnected nature of art and biography in the works of Eugenio Montale, who is arguably the most significant modern Italian poet. His earlier books include Frank Lloyd Wright in Word and Form; Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives; and The Tuning of the Word: the Musico-literary Poetics of Symbolist Movement.
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Hertz has published works on modern poetry written in French, German, Italian, and English, and also music, drama, and architectural history. His latest book, which grew out of his extensive study of the world of song with Indiana University students, is The American Songbook from Vaudeville to Hollywood. A composer and pianist, Hertz studied at Juilliard and the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (from which he holds a degree). Among his master teachers were Bernhard Heiden, Marion Hall, Abbey Simon, and Hans Graf. He also studied jazz piano and harmony with the legendary Barry Harris, who worked with Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many more. Hertz has received grants from the Mellon and Graham Foundations and is listed in Who’s Who Among College Teachers. From 2003-2006 and 2008-2017, Hertz was a member of the National Council on the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C.
Jonathan White
Emeritus Professor of English
Essex University
Born in Britain, Jonathan White grew up in the USA and Australia. He wrote his PhD on Shakespeare for the University of Cambridge between 1969 and 1974. From 1972 to 2009 he taught widely at Essex University on English and European literature courses, classical to modern, including postcolonial studies. His main long-term interests are in European cultural history, particularly Italian and French literature and other art forms. Over recent years he has increasingly worked on tracing cultural lineages from the Renaissance and Enlightenment through to the modern age. He has edited Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism (1993), and published Italy: The Enduring Culture (2001) and Italian Cultural Lineages (2007). For two semesters of 2002-2003 he held a fellowship at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, New York; then in late 2003 another at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. He held a further, visiting research professorship at the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan for four months in 2008.
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Professor White's interest in opera has led to his writing several articles for programmes of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. His ongoing work on global inhumanities and their commemoration has given rise to an article on Derek Walcott’s handling of slavery and massacres of Native Americans; to another on the Korean War Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C.; and to a journal contribution grounded in his childhood memories of 1950s USA that extends to general theories of “memory mapping” in relation to cultural history. Professor White’s most recent works include The City and the Ocean: Journey, Meomey, Imagination (2012) and Landscape, Seasapce and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (2018), both of which were co-edited with Professor I-Chun Wang of the National Sun Yat-Sen University.