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Biography
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2005, she received a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is the recipient also of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics. In 2002-3, she was the visiting Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her research interests are in German aesthetic theory and in particular in the relationship between philosophy, politics, history, and music.
She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: 1992) (second edition 2007 with a new essay; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (Oxford 1998), and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto] (Columbia UP, 2008). She is co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (Columbia UP, 2006).
She has written many articles, most recently on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Arthur Danto. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2008 (spring), she is a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: “The Language of Emotions”). She regularly offers courses in the history of aesthetic theory, the contemporary philosophy of the arts, critical theory, and the philosophy of history.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Music, Aesthetics, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, and 19th and 20th Century Philosophy.
Selected Publications
Series editor with Gregg Horowitz, Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism and the Arts, Columbia University Press. Columbia University Press
“Dissonant Works and the Listening Public”, in T. Huhn, ed., Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge UP). 2004
“Understanding the Engaged Philosopher” in T. Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, ed., Cambridge Companion on Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge UP). 2004
“Philosophical exercises in repetition: on music, humor, and exile in Wittgenstein and Adorno,” Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb, eds., Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, (Harvard University Press). 2005
“Reviewing Adorno”, an introductory essay for the second edition of Adorno’s Critical Models, Columbia University Press. 2005
“Undoing the Discourse of Fate. The Case of Der Fliegende Holländer,” The Opera Quarterly, 21/3 (2005), 1-22.
“Juliette fährt nach Mahagonny OR A Critical Reading of Surrealist Opera,” ed. Perspektiven der Opernforschung; also The Opera Quarterly, 21/4 (2005), 647-674.
“Afterwords,” Introductory essay to Arthur Danto’s Narration and Knowledge (including his Analytical Philosophy of History), Columbia University Press. 2007
Also in History and Theory, 46 (Feb 2007), 1-28.
“Hardboiled Disillusionment. Mahagonny as the last culinary opera,” Cultural Critique 68 (2008), 3-37.
“Musikdrama,”. S. L. Sorgner, et. al. eds. Wagner und Nietzsche. Kultur-Werk-Wirkung. Ein Handbuch. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt. 2008
“‘Three Blind Mice’. Goodman, McLuhan and Adorno on the Art of Music and Listening in the Age of Global Transmission,” New German Critique. 2008
“Kunst und Politik,” Handbuch der politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, hrsg. S. Gosepath, W. Hinsch, & B. Rössler. 2008
“Aida and the Empire of Emotions. On Adorno, Said, and Kluge” (forthcoming).
“Perspectivism without Perspective or Philosophy without Art. Standing on the Stage with Nietzsche’s Gay Science,” Gertrud Koch, ed. Perspektive - Die Spaltung der Standpunkte, Fink Verlag (in German).
“Opera for Eyes and Ears: Toward a Domestic History of the Telephone,” in George Möhr, ed., Vom Sinn des Hörens.
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