On January 3, 2015, scholar Daniel Albright (1945–2015), the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University—who counted himself, among other accolades, as an NEH Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin—passed away unexpectedly. The author of sixteen books, which straddled a range of interests from literary criticism and musicology to panaesthetics and the history of modernism, Albright taught in three departments at Harvard, where he had worked for the past decade.

From an article in the Harvard Crimson:

As an undergraduate at Rice University, Albright originally declared a major in mathematics before switching to English. Upon graduating from Rice in 1967, he attended Yale, where he received his M.Phil in 1969 and his Ph.D. in 1970. Prior to his arrival at Harvard in 2003, Albright taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Munich, the University of Rochester, and the Eastman School of Music.

Once at Harvard, he taught in the English, Music, and Comparative Literature departments. English Department chair and professor W. James Simpson spoke highly of Albright’s career in Cambridge.

“Whenever Dan was in a room, the room was full of fun and amusement and delight because of his range of literary allusions and music allusions,” Simpson said. “He was constantly delighting an audience.”

Among those books he edited or authored were three published and/or distributed by the University of Chicago Press: Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts; Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources; and Evasions (Sylph Editions).

To read more about those works, click here.

To read a remembrance on Albright’s website, click here.