Daniel R. Schwarz (1941–) is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1968. He is a renowned teacher, scholar, and public intellectual. In 1998, he received Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences Russell award for distinguished teaching. In 1999 he received the Weiss title, which is Cornell’s most esteemed teaching honor.
Since 2009, Schwarz has been Faculty President of the Cornell chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been the longtime Faculty Advisor to the Literary Society and House Fellow at Rose House, one of Cornell’s five residential colleges. Schwarz’s fifty years at Cornell were celebrated with a two-day conference entitled “Celebrating Dan Schwarz: Fifty Years of Transformative Teaching,” attended by several hundred of his former students.
Schwarz has directed nine NEH seminars and lectured widely in the United States and abroad, including a number of lecture tours under the auspices of the academic programs of the USIS and State Department. He has held three endowed visiting professorships and been a Guest Fellow for short periods at Oxford and Cambridge.
He is author of the well-received Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times, 1999–2009 (Excelsior Edition of SUNY Press, 2012; paperback edition with a new preface, 2014). He has written on the media and higher education for The Huffington Post. His book on undergraduate education, How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning (2017–18), has had a wide circulation and been translated into Mandarin for an edition published in China.
Schwarz is a leading authority on James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, twentieth-century Modernism, and theory of the novel as well as on humanistic and pluralistic approaches to literature. Also an authority on the Holocaust, he has recently published The Story in Fiction and Film of French Collaboration in the Occupation and Complicity in the Holocaust (1940–1944).
His more recent scholarly books are Reading the European Novel to 1900 (2014) and Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 (2018–2019). His books include In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2008) in the prestigious Blackwell Manifesto series; Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture (2003); and Imagining the Holocaust (1999).
He has edited Joyce’s The Dead (1994) and Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (1997) in the Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism Series. He served as Consulting Editor of the six-volume edition of The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli (2004), for which he wrote the General Introduction. He is General Editor of the multi-volume critical series Reading the Novel, for which he wrote Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel, 1890–1930 (2004) and a two-volume study of the European Novel.
His interests include travel, art museums, theatre, ballet, music, tennis, fishing, long walks, and swimming. He has published over a hundred poems as well as numerous articles on current events, higher education, and travel.
View his work at:
courses.cit.cornell.edu/drs6/
Paperback: 124 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (September 30, 2025)