Hillel Schwartz (historian)

Hillel Schwartz (born 1948) is an American cultural historian, poet and translator.

Hillel Schwartz was born in Chicago and got his B.A. degree at Brandeis University in 1969. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in European History at Yale University (1974), and the following year he got a master's degree in library science (M.L.S.) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Schwartz considers himself primarily an independent scholar, but he has also taught history, humanities, and religious studies at UC Berkeley (1975), the University of Florida, Gainesville (1975–77), San Diego State University (1979–82, 1996). Most recently, he was an instructor in the History Department at UC San Diego (1992).

Schwartz has been both a fellow at and an adviser to the Millennium Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization founded in the 1980s to work on global sustainability issues.

Schwartz lives in Encinitas, California.

Schwartz, who has been called a "peripatetic cultural historian," has written on the French prophets, millenarianism, and copies, as well as on the history of dieting, fat, and noise. His scholarship is formidable, with one of his recent books, Making Noise, sporting 350 pages of notes. Schwartz's work has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese.

Making Noise examines the changing understanding of sound in western culture—from music to tinnitis, babies' cries to urban hubbub—demonstrating that the primacy of the visual in human experience has been somewhat oversold.

The Culture of the Copy is a comprehensive 600-page exploration of doubles of all kinds: facsimiles, reproductions, fakes, twins, mannequins, trompe l'oeil painting, camouflage, and so on. Schwartz examines how copies have been framed in western culture over the centuries, with a particular interest in the ethical dimensions of our relationship to replicas. Schwartz takes the position that copies are an important part of our cultural inheritance and should not be immediately dismissed as inauthentic.

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