Adrian Daub

Professor of Comparative Literature

Professor of German Studies

J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities

Director, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research

Director of Undergraduate Studies, German Studies

Curriculum Vitae

2008: Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania

2004: M.A. University of Pennsylvania

2003: B.A. Swarthmore College

My research in German Studies focuses on the long nineteenth century, in particular the interplay between literature, gender, music and philosophy. My research also deals with gender, higher education, information technology and media post-World War II.

My first book, "Zwillingshafte Gebärden": Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), traces four-hand piano playing as both a cultural practice and a motif in literature, art and philosophy (an English edition of the book appeared as Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)). My second book Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explored German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche. Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013), deals with eroticism in German opera after Wagner. My most recent academic book, The Dynastic Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the fate of the dynasty in the age of the nuclear family. What The Ballad Knows, a comparative and intermedial study of the ballad-form in nineteenth century Europe appeared in 2022 with Oxford University Press.

In addition, I have published articles on topics such as fin-de-siècle German opera, the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, literature and scandal, the cultural use of ballads in the nineteenth century, and writers like Novalis, Stefan George, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald. I also write on popular culture and politics: in this capacity I co-wrote The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (with Charles Kronengold) and published a German-language essay collection Pop Up Nation (Hanser, 2016). My book What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) has been translated into six languages, The Cancel Culture Panic (2024) has been translated into three. In 2026, I published What Tech Calls Governing, and my book Project 1933: Fascism Then and Now is forthcoming in 2027.

I write articles and essays for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Die Zeit (Germany), The Guardian (UK), The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, Granta, Longreads and the LA Review of Books.