Educated at Yale University (PhD, 1974), the University of California at Berkeley (MLS, 1975), and Brandeis University (BA, 1969), Hillel Schwartz is a poet, cultural historian, and, most recently, the author of the nine-hundred-page Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. Schwartz’s other books include The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (Zone, 1996); Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s (Doubleday, 1990); Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (Free Press, 1986); and The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in 18th-Century England (California, 1980). Schwartz has taught in departments of history, humanities, religious studies, literature, and communication at the University of California at San Diego, San Diego State University, and the University of Florida. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies.
During his time at the Academy, Hillel Schwartz will address the question of “emergency.” He begins from the traditional understanding of emergency as “an unanticipated juncture that demands immediate, direct, often concerted action so as to stave off drastic threats or to cope with aftermaths of disaster.” Today, however, emergencies have come to be associated with fashion, contraception, and daycare as well as oil spills, nuclear “incidents,” climate change, and international terrorism – a remarkable shift in nature and notion since “emergency” was floated into written English in the 1600s. Once temporary and local, an emergency may now be global and ongoing. Once unpredictable, an emergency may now be calibrated by degrees of likelihood. Emergency, he argues, has become so broad and diffuse an experience as to be not only generic but oxymoronic: something to be expected in which we invest cultural and political capital so as to manage our world with some confidence. He suspects that the spatial, temporal, and psychic broadening of emergency is the result of confluences in the sciences and arts, in finance and communications, in literature for children and protocols for physicians, in theories of justice and polity. Schwartz will explore these confluences from 1760 to the present, through a range of sources: children’s books, first-aid kits, the architecture of exits, the practice of crisis counseling, and consumer products for home “preparedness.” In the process, he will consider studies of the secularization of apocalypse, analyses of contingency in philosophy and physics, and polemics about acceleration and accident in modern life.
Meet Hillel Schwartz
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.
Upcoming events
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Berlin Journal Articles
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Videos
Lectures, readings, and conversations filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center.
Whistling Up A Storm – Toward a History of Emergency
How differently do we now understand and approach emergencies, and what does it mean in 2014 — philosophically, medically, politically, emotionally — to “be prepared for” emergencies? In this lecture, cultural historian and translator Hillel Schwartz investigates the history and changing conditions of the term “emergency.”
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
