This is the personal website of Adrian Daub, academic, writer, podcaster and stunningly amateurish web designer.
I am an academic and critic based in San Francisco and Berlin. I am currently the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities in the Departments of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where I specialize in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. Since 2019, I have also served as the Faculty Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
I am the author of six academic books: Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth Century Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 2014 (the substantially different German version: “Zwillingshafte Gebärden”: Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert appeared in 2009). Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Romanticism and Idealism and Tristan’s Shadow: Sex and the Total Work of Art after Wagner appeared with University of Chicago Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. My book The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in 19th Century Germany was published by University of Chicago Press in 2020, and What The Ballad Knows was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
My academic articles have dealt with topics as diverse as Richard Wagner, early feminism, Charlie Chaplin, and literary scandals. I have written about writers like Thomas Mann, W.G. Sebald, Heinrich Heine, Dorothea Schlegel, Frank Wedekind, Stefan George, and Alexander Kluge; about composers like Franz Schreker, Richard Strauss and Olivier Messiaen; artists and directors like Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Stanley Kubrick, Hermann Nitsch, Günther Brus, Terrence Malick and even Quentin Tarantino. I previously served as the co-editor of the Goethe Yearbookand and have guest-edited issues of Opera Quarterly and Republics of Letters.
I am also an active cultural critic and political commentator. With Charles Kronengold I published The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a book of his German-language essays appeared with Hanser Verlag as Pop-Up Nation in 2016. What Tech Calls Thinking appeared with Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2020, a German translation (Was das Valley Denken Nennt) was published with Suhrkamp Verlag in November 2020. In 2022 I published Cancel Culture Transfer with Suhrkamp (a heavily revised English edition will appear as The Cancel Culture Panic with Stanford University Press in 2024).
I write about politics, literature, culture and universities for German newspapers (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and others) and for Anglo-American outlets (n+1, The Guardian, Longreads, OneZero, The New Republic, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post and Paste Magazine), and have appeared on the radio in both Germany, the UK and the US. Together with Laura Goode I host the podcast The Feminist Present, which features weekly interviews with important feminist voices from across the world.