Biography
David Ferris teaches seminars on opera, the classical style, Mozart, the Schumanns, folklorism, and jazz. He also teaches an Analyzing Diversity course on jazz history and racial politics, and has taught a First-year Writing Intensive Seminar on musical biography. He was a member of the Senate working group that created the Program in Writing and Communication, and he served as the Associate Faculty Director of the FWIS Program from 2015–2019. Before coming to Rice University in 1998, Professor Ferris taught at the University of Houston, Amherst College, and MIT.
Professor Ferris' research interests include early 19th-century German Romantic song, fictional and cinematic biography, the lives and music of the Schumanns, and the life and works of C.P.E. Bach. His work has been published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Routledge Press, and has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Music and Letters. He has edited two volumes for the new complete edition of C. P. E. Bach’s works, and one volume (in collaboration with Kazuko Ozawa) for the new Robert Schumann edition. Prof. Ferris has presented papers at national conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, France, UK, and Germany. In 2004, he spent a semester at the American Academy in Berlin as a Berlin Prize Fellow.