Hillel Schwartz

(Photo: Annette Hornischer)

Hillel Schwartz is a cultural historian, poet, and translator. His current research on the changing notions and nature of “emergency” was awarded a 2014 Berlin Prize in Cultural History by the American Academy in Berlin. As an historian, he is best known for studies of sound (Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang, and Beyond, 2011), of replication (The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, 1996 and 2014) and of dieting (Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat, 1986).

His translations from the Korean, in collaboration with Sunny Jung, have resulted in two volumes of poetry: Kim Nam-jo, Rain, Sky, Wind, Port (2014); Ko Un, Abiding Places: Korea South and North (2006; finalist, Balcones Prize).

From 2009 to 2014, he co-founded and directed a medical case management company that helped patients deal with complex medical problems requiring the coordination of care among physicians, pharmacists, social workers, caregivers, family members, and friends. Out of this experience came Long Days Last Days: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Those at the Bedside (2012).

A graduate of Brandeis University, Berkeley, and Yale, Hillel Schwartz is an independent scholar but has taught occasionally in departments of history, literature, religious studies, communication, and visual arts, most recently at University of California, San Diego, where he was founding director of the core curriculum for Sixth College: Culture Art and Technology. He has also been project scholar for national and regional public arts initiatives in the United States, and for the design of the theme pavilion, The Future of the Past, at EXPO2000 in Hannover, Germany.