Dan Wang is assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh. He has contributed articles to The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and to the journal 19th-Century Music.
“By turns powerful and moving, Lyric Personhood is a profoundly original study of the impact of audiovisual storytelling on identity. This is not just a book about film, opera, or music in screen media; true to its title, this is a book about the role of audiovisual forms in the formation of the self. With satisfying attention to detail, Wang generously unfolds figurations of personhood (the addict, the lover) and situates them in a cultural and historical fabric. Opera, film, and music scholars will read it with interest and pleasure, but it joins the select company of books whose reach is much wider.” * Christopher Morris, Maynooth University * “What if our ideas about personhood are created by music and movies as much as by morality and the law? Wang argues that the category of the ‘person’ is experienced affectively and aesthetically. Lyric Personhood shows how we learn what it feels like to be a person, from Wagner’s operas to post-9/11 melodramas, from speeches in romantic comedies to the music in avant-garde films. Inventive, surprising, and beautifully written, this is a groundbreaking new work.” * Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University *