Daniel H. Foster chairs the Liberal Arts Department at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University.

A scholar with a particular interest in the intersection of music, literature, and drama, he is the author of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks (Cambridge 2010) and is currently at work on From Bards to Blackface, or How the Minstrel Changed His Tune. His papers and articles have been published in journals and outlets ranging from Journal of American Drama and Theatre to Smithsonian Magazine to the Huffington Post.

He has previously served as a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia and an associate professor at Duke University. At UEA, he was also the director of the media center, where he led development of digital humanities projects and worked to incorporate technology into the classroom. He has produced and/or directed performances of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, among others.

Foster received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Comparative Literature Department, earning honors for his dissertation on Richard Wagner’s use of classical Greek drama and poetry as models for his operatic treatment of German myth and national identity. He was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum and taught in Penn’s Music Department.