About

Adrian Daub is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research focuses on the long nineteenth century, particularly questions of gender in literature, music, and philosophy. He has authored several books, including 'Zwillingshafte Gebärden', which explores four-hand piano playing as a cultural practice and motif in literature, art, and philosophy; 'Uncivil Unions', examining German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche; 'Tristan's Shadow', dealing with eroticism in German opera after Wagner; and 'The Dynastic Imagination', a comparative and intermedial study of the fate of the dynasty in the age of the nuclear family. His recent work includes a comparative study of the ballad-form in nineteenth-century Europe, scheduled for publication in 2022. Daub has also published articles on topics such as German opera, women composers, feminist philosophy, film and music, and cultural legacies of figures like Wagner, Novalis, Stefan George, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald. Beyond academic publications, he writes on popular culture and politics, co-authoring 'The James Bond Songs' and publishing 'Pop Up Nation'. His book 'What Tech Calls Thinking' has been translated into five languages. He is the Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities, and has previously directed the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Department of German Studies at Stanford.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Political Science
• Art
• Law
• Philosophy
• Geomorphology
• Geology

Selected publications

• Sophie Mereau (1770–1806)

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract As is the case with many nineteenth-century women, literary history has often framed Sophie Mereau (1770–1806) as a muse for the more famous men around her, as a poet in dialogue with the philosophies of the various ages her short life straddled. In recent years, however, scholars have identified Mereau as an originary thinker and important coequal philosophical interlocutor. This article suggests that Mereau’s philosophy was articulated through genres that were only gradually being recognized as vehicles for philosophy—poetry, fragment, letter. It proposes that Mereau strategically triangulated between competing philosophical preoccupations of her age to carve out a unique philosophical program that combined an idealist politics with pronounced political edge.

  PublisherDOI

• Popular Culture: Whose Music? What People?

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  In her memoirs, Imogen Holst (1907–1984) tells a modern Orpheus myth, but in comparison to its ancient forerunner, it is less clear what her version means. The story goes like this: during rehearsals for her father’s famous concert suite The Planets, op. 32, when the orchestra reached the middle sec

  PublisherDOI

• “Half Necessity, Half Accident”: Reading the Abolition of Good Health through Adorno's Concept of “Natural History”

  Rethinking Marxism · 2023-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The transformation of medication into a proper “market” takes the shape of what has been called “the abolition of good health. “In the interest of branding products and expanding sales, drug companies now are actively engaged in redefining sickness and health. The surprising by-product of this redefinition has been a vigorous discourse on personhood and human nature, in which the drug companies play the role of the critical theorist (redefining as illnesses conditions hitherto thought “natural”), whereas the industry’s critics have taken an essentialist and at times even conservative tack (insisting that some diseases have “meaning” and should not be done away with). This paper proposes to think through this puzzling reversal using Theodor W. Adorno’s concepts of “natural history,” the “abolition of death,” and the “jargon of authenticity. “It will hope to show that the “abolition” offered by the drug companies is in fact at base a reactionary topos, promising surcease from the effects of a “false praxis” rather than addressing that praxis itself—and, in fact, foreclosing any cognition of the falsity of that praxis.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ballad’s Years of Travel

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The art ballad entered German literature in the mid-eighteenth century, but it truly began its dominance with the so-called ballad year 1797, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller volleyed back and forth an evolving set of formally ambitious variations on popular themes. This entrance into the German literary canon decisively inflected the cultural presuppositions and political anxieties that attached to the new form of the art ballad. In the British Isles, the ballad had become an object of interest after the Act of Union (1707): it told national histories belonging to nations understood to belong to the past. In Germany, the national community to which these poems addressed themselves was located in the future. In the British Isles, the ballad had begun reaching a broader literary public under empiricist premises, and the questions around balladry were about provenance, authenticity, and evidence. The initial German discourse around balladry drew heavily on the British conversation but did so with a temporal lag and under radically different premises. When Goethe and Schiller undertook their ballad research, they constituted a new and explicitly invented canon of poems in a network with other writers, but also with composers, visual artists, and others. Authenticity alternated with irony throughout their efforts, and their ballads manage to tell stories of both ancient memories and decidedly contemporary media. This was to shape the German ballad going forward: while it could often seem nostalgic, the form was ideally positioned to register historic change and modernization as it occurred.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ballad and the Sea

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter traces the relationship of the German ballad to the sea. In the early nineteenth century, Germany’s coast was understood as ultimately exotic and regionally specific. By the late nineteenth century, through an upsurge in tourism, through cultural reinterpretation, but also due to the excitement the Kaiserreich managed to generate for the German fleet, the seashore had become nationalized. During the same period, the ballad was increasingly positioned (among its popularizers as much as among the poets themselves) as a national form, and poets from Detlev Liliencrohn to Arno Holz used the form to reconcile what was regional and what was national in life on the shore, and by extension in the ballad. This chapter focuses on how issues of language, dialect, memory, and politics became entangled as writers, both in “high” German and in regional dialects, were forced to grapple with the reality that the nation to which the ballad was thought to belong suddenly was an actual country.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘In Nature's Good Old College’: Sexual Politics and the Long Shadow of Hegel

  Hegel Bulletin · 2022-11-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Although his positions on gender were neither particularly radical nor particularly representative of his age, Hegel proved counterintuitively central to early German philosophers elaborating openly feminist positions. The Young Hegelians' critique of religion offered a readymade way to critique traditional modes of grounding and vindicating gender roles. But it also, especially among more materialist thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach, tended to rely on supposedly “natural” bases for gender inequality. This article traces a line of women thinkers beginning in Hegel's age, stretching through the immediate aftermath of Hegel's death, all the way to the fin-de-siècle, who sought to destabilize the very idea of nature that lay behind both Hegelian and Young Hegelian accounts. Thinkers like Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859), Louise Dittmar (1807–1884), and Helene von Druskowitz (1856–1918) charted a path between Hegel himself, Hegel's critics, renewers, and overcomers, to arrive at strikingly modern position. In particular von Druskowitz, critic of Feuerbach and Comte, interlocutor to Nietzsche and Hartmann, ended up with a philosophical position on nature that was nearly identical to the most radical feminist proposals of the 1960s: the end of human nature, even if it meant the end of the species.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The German ballad has long occupied a strange position in German literature. The ballad canon is probably among the most widely known set of poems among everyday Germans, but they have played a secondary role in literary studies. Ballads were poems one lived and interacted with, not necessarily poems that one studied. Part of the reason is that ballad aesthetics seemed to contravene the central impulses that propelled poetics with the onset of modernism: they tended to emphasize narrative over lyricism, convention over formal innovation, and an engagement with the outside world over autonomy. This introduction shows why these poems nevertheless allow us to tell a cultural history of Germany over the last 200 years.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ballad and Its Narratives

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The New German School of the mid-nineteenth century drew on the compositional innovations of Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Franz Liszt. Its protagonists, by contrast, are mostly forgotten today. Together with their far more famous teachers, this generation of composers vastly expanded the range of musical pieces that could be thought of as ballads: they popularized instrumental ballads in the mode of Chopin, they wrote choral ballads and symphonic ballads, and they based operas and concert pieces on the emerging ballad canon. What seemed to unite this motley assortment of musical objects claiming to be ballads seemed to have little to do with formal features or subject matter. It had above all to do with the fact that these works were offered to an audience, and accepted by that audience, as somehow “balladic.” This chapter asks how the composers of the New German School, both as musicians and as critics, thought about music and its appeal to a broadening and democratizing public—and highlights the central role of balladry, this literature of the commons, in their attempts. The chapter focuses on the work of Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt, and Liszt’s student Joachim Raff.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ballad, the Public, and Gendered Community

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By the mid-nineteenth century, the ballad was an emphatically bookish form—frequently anthologized, featured in periodicals, used in schoolbooks. But the ballad also still retained the power to create small communities—not quite a reading public, not just a family or classroom. And in particular it was used in, and used to create, gendered communities. In Berlin, a group of (male) artists, public servants, and academics met in a literary society called the “Tunnel over the Spree” (Berlin’s main river). They spent their meetings drinking and socializing, but their main focus was on literary competition—above all, their ballad contest ended up having an outsized influence on the direction the ballad would take in incipient German literary realism. This chapter contrasts the gender politics of balladry among the members of the “Tunnel” with those of women composers composing ballad settings—many of them had founded, or become associated with the choral societies that had sprung up across the German-speaking world in the first few decades of the century. Their efforts as composers reflected, but also sought critical distance from, the gender politics implied by the single-gender space of a choral academy or choral society.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ballad and the Family

  2022-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract During the nineteenth century, the ballad was—both in England and in the German-speaking world—frequently understood in hereditary terms: it was a tradition passed down as an heirloom from generation to generation, its authority rested on its supposedly oral ancestry, and it, like the fairy tale, tended to tell of family lines in disarray whose proper transmitting function had to be brought into line. This association of poetic form and family politics made sisterhood a useful, but ambiguous, topic for ballads that wanted to interrogate the ideology of the ballad. This chapter traces family structures in Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s balladry, and Friedrich Hebbel’s family ballads. The chapter traces how sisterhood allowed for a kind of anti-balladry—poems that looked and sounded like ballads, but that undercut the ballad’s claim to represent popular knowledge, oral culture, and the ancestry of the Volk.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Harold P. Blum

  64 shared

• Richard H. Armstrong

  University of Houston

  64 shared

• Liliane Weissberg

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  64 shared

• Tabitha Freeman

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  64 shared

• Laurence A. Rickels

  64 shared

• Andrew Parker

  64 shared

• Jama Adams

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  64 shared

• Avital Ronell

  New York University

  64 shared

Labs

• Adrian Daub LabPI