Lydia Goehr

Lydia Goehr is Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is currently chair of the Department of Philosophy.

Her university awards include: Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2009/2010); The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA) (2007/8), and Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching (2005).

She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. In 2024 and 2025, she was a Visiting Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Empirical Aesthetics) in Frankfurt and taught at the Courtauld Institute, London. in 2020, she was a Mellon fellow at the Tate Museum in London and, in 2019, a Visiting Professor at the University of Torino. In 2008, she was Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin (Cluster: "The Language of Emotions") and, in 2009, for the FU-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University.  In 2002-3, she was the Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and 2000-2001, Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner's Die Meistersinger.

Lydia Goehr is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992/2007 with a new essay); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (2008, essays on Adorno and Danto); Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread. A Philosophical Detective Story (2021); David Lean (Filmmaker and Philosopher) (2025). Her current projects include Furniture-Art: Essays on Objects and Objections; and Violin Lessons: Notes toward a Philosophy of Practice.  She is co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006), and co-editor with Jonathan Gilmore of Blackwell's A Companion to Arthur C. Danto (2022). With Gregg Horowitz, she is series editor of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia University Press.