David Yaffe (January 1, 1973 - November 15 (?), 2024) was an American academic, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, where he attended the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence, and he began writing for The Village Voice while he was a student there. He received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a professor of humanities at Syracuse University — where he began teaching in 2005 – and is known for his critical writings on music. [1] During the 2008–2009 academic year, he was the Gould Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Claremont McKenna College. He subsequently returned to Syracuse. He taught in the English department from 2005 to 2013, then received tenure from the university, and was an unaffiliated professor of humanities until his death. He served as the Dean's Fellow in the Humanities from 2013 to 2015. His writings appeared in many publications, including the New York Review of Books , The Paris Review , Bookforum , Harper's Magazine , The Nation , Slate , The New York Times , New York Magazine , The Village Voice , The Daily Beast , and The Chronicle of Higher Education . [1] Beginning in 2021, he contributed regularly to Air Mail .
Along with Ruth Franklin, he was awarded the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, presented by the Center for Fiction. [1]
His third book, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (FSG, 2017), was the winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, and a Washington Post Notable Book of the year, 2017. It has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Danish, and German. It has been optioned for a scripted series with Sony Entertainment.
Among other media appearances, including PBS NewsHour , in December 2018 Yaffe appeared on an episode of BBC Radio 4's Soul Music , discussing the Joni Mitchell song "River". [2]
On November 14, 2024, Professor Yaffe was admitted to a New York hospital with abdominal pain. After being treated and released, he returned to his apartment, where he was later found dead.
Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and painter. As one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her personal lyrics and unconventional compositions which grew to incorporate pop and jazz elements. Among her accolades are eleven Grammy Awards, and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic has stated, "Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century."
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
Allen Mandelbaum was an American professor of literature and the humanities, poet, and translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian. His translations of classic works gained him numerous awards in Italy and the United States.
Mark Gerald Kingwell is a Canadian philosopher, professor and former associate chair at the University of Toronto's Department of Philosophy. Kingwell is a fellow of Trinity College. He specialises in theories of politics and culture. He writes widely in both scholarly and mainstream venues, and addresses specific topics in social justice, discourse ethics, aesthetics, film theory, philosophy of architecture and urbanism, philosophy of technology, and cultural theory.
"Coyote" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell from her eighth album Hejira (1976). It was released as the album's lead single.
Talât Sait Halman, GBE was a Turkish poet, translator and cultural historian. He was the first Minister of Culture of Turkey. From 1998 onward, he taught at Bilkent University as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters.
Brian Christopher Mitchell is the president and managing principal of Academic Innovators. Prior to founding Academic Innovators, he served as president of Brian Mitchell & Associates, LLC. He was previously the president of Bucknell University, serving from 2004 until 2010. From 1998 through 2004, he served as president of Washington & Jefferson College. He is a nationally recognized expert in higher education, especially on private higher education.
David Ellenson was an American rabbi and academic who was known as a leader of the Reform movement in Judaism. Ellenson was director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and visiting professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies at Brandeis University and previously president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). He previously served as president of HUC-JIR from 2001 to December 31, 2013, and was later chancellor emeritus of that college until his death. Ellenson had served as interim president following the death of his successor, Aaron D. Panken until the inauguration of Andrew Rehfeld, the 10th and current President.
"Both Sides, Now" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. One of the first recordings is by Judy Collins, whose version appeared on the US singles chart during the fall of 1968. The next year it was included on Mitchell's album Clouds, and became one of her best-known songs. It has since been recorded by dozens of artists, including Dion in 1968, Clannad with Paul Young in 1991, and Mitchell herself, who re-recorded the song with an orchestral arrangement on her 2000 album Both Sides Now.
Keith Gilyard is a writer and American professor of English and African American Studies. He has passionately embraced African American expressive culture over the course of his career as a poet, scholar, and educator. Beyond his own literary output, he has pursued – and in some instances merged - two main lines of humanistic inquiry: literary studies, with its concern for beauty and significant form, and rhetorical studies, with its emphasis on the effect of trope and argument in culture. Moreover, his interests branch out into popular culture, civic discourse, and educational praxis. A critical perspective concerning these areas is, in his view, integral to the development of discerning and productive publics both on and beyond campuses and therefore crucial to the optimal practice of democracy.
Robert Beachy is associate professor of history at the Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He was raised in Mennonite communities in Puerto Rico and Indiana. He formerly taught at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
William S. Penn is a writer and English professor at Michigan State University.
Joseph Skibell is an American novelist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tesuque, New Mexico.
Srinivas Aravamudan was an Indian-born American academic. He was a professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies at Duke University, where he also served as dean of the humanities. He was widely recognized for his work on eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. His publications included books and articles on novels, slavery, abolition, secularism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, climate change, and the anthropocene.
Gregg Lambert is an American philosopher and literary theorist, who writes on Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, critical theory and film, the contemporary university, and especially on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the founding director of Syracuse University Humanities Center, where he currently holds the distinguished research appointment as Dean's Professor of Humanities, and was Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Central New York Humanities Corridor between 2008-2019.CNY Corridor
Howard Paul Segal was an American historian who was a professor of history at the University of Maine. Specializing in the history of American technology and American utopianism, he wrote well over 200 articles and authored or edited eight books including Technology and Utopia, Technology, Pessimism, and Post-Modernism ; Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America;Utopias: A Brief History;Technology in America ; Technological Utopianism in American Culture; and Recasting the Machine Age.
Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Ruth Franklin is an American literary critic. She is a former editor at The New Republic and an Adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016.
Arthur Kratzmann (1925-2015) was an Australian teacher and later professor of education who spent most of his adult life working in Canada.
Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has been the subject of controversy for her use of blackface since the mid-1970s.