Daniel Fischlin is a Canadian early modern literary and music scholar, who has written a number of books on the relations between music and literary texts and music, nationalism, gender, and human rights including The Community of Rights: The Rights of Community. Fischlin is the creator of the online resource Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) and the recipient of the 2000 Premier's Research Excellence Award.
Education
Daniel Fischlin graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Performance and with a Master of Arts in Musicology and English Literature. Fischlin also studied Literary and Theater studies at York University, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature.
Career
A Shakespearean and modern literary scholar, and a jazz and music scholar, Daniel Fischlin has made impressive contributions to both fields. He has co-edited several books on the socio-political implications of improvised creative music with Dr. Ajay Heble, project director of the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) research project, Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP). The result was several published books including Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making (2003) and The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue (2004). He has also published some other books that study the relations between music and literary texts and music, nationalism, and gender and has published 14 books across a range of disciplines including human rights, literary theory and biography, Latin American studies, and Jacobean studies. The books Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass (2002), A Concise Guide to Global Human Rights (2006), The Community of Rights: The Rights of Community (2011) are the "Rights Trilogy," co-authored with Martha Nandorfy. Daniel Fischlin has been published by lots of University presses such as Duke University Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Wayne State University Press.
Daniel Fischlin's research interests include modern culture and interdisciplinary studies, with an emphasis on the various connections between literature and music. He specialized in the early modern Renaissance studies and his experience teaching Shakespeare has led him to a number of projects. He is the founder and director of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), a website that was launched in 2004 with Version 2 of the site launched in August of 2007, and the Shakespeare Learning Commons, a pedagogical site embedded on the CASP site. Among others, Daniel has been involved in a number of innovative online projects including literacy games for youth, interactive readers, content-based site design, and most recently the Romeo + Juliet application released in 2011 on the Apple iOS platform. Daniel is also the creator, designer, and producer of Speare - an online 3D video game for youth that teaches Shakespearean literacy, launched in April 2007, as well as co-creator of the online literacy game Chronos, launched in 2008 on the CASP site. Fischlin has extensive experience in humanities computing design and innovation and has been instrumental in rethinking the way in which the web is conceived as a place where substantive content can be presented in unique multimedia virtual spaces. In 2009 Daniel has created the Shakespeare Made in Canada Virtual Exhibit, which houses a multitude of resources (film, photographs, and other multimedia) that document the relationship between Canadian culture and Shakespeare including the Canadian-owned Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare, contemporary Canadian theatre designs, Shakespeare in French Canada, contemporary Aboriginal adaptations of Shakespeare. Daniel has also played a key role in the 2008 film Battle of Wills by Anne Henderson, documenting the steps taken to authenticate the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare. Since then he has been especially active in the research documenting the remarkable genealogy associated with the Sanders Portrait.
Fischlin has served as the General Series Editor for Oxford University Press's unique re-edition of the Shakespeare plays (Shakespeare Made in Canada) from a specifically Canadian point of view, featuring prominent Canadian scholars and authors. He also serves as the General Series Editor of Duke University Press's series entitled Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, a key component of the research outcomes associated with the ICASP (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice) project. Daniel has taught at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He became a professor in 2001, then a joint director of the Doctor of Philosophy program, and the University Research Chair. Fischlin has held a number of SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Standard Research Grants and Awards and has been the only arts scholar ever to have won a Premier's Research Excellence Award at the time.
When Daniel Fischlin was young he took lessons on flamenco and classical guitar with the inspirational George Doxas in a church basement in Montreal and studying along the way with a number of teachers in Canada, France, and the United States. Aside from a short stint with an alt-fusion band that included some of the Doroschuk brothers (of Men Without Hats notoriety), Fischlin was especially active in the early music scene in Montreal, as a founding member of the acclaimed group Musica Secreta (along with Hank Knox, Valerie Kinslow, Suzie Leblanc, and Betsy MacMillan), and as an occasional player in the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montreal (SMAM) under Christopher Jackson and Réjean Poirier.
During this period he was heard as both a performer and composer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and was a founding member, with composer Alan Belkin, of the Composer's Concert Society, devoted to promoting new music by young Canadian composers played by young Canadian musicians. As a classical guitarist, he performed world premieres of work by Andrew P. MacDonald and Chan Ka Nin. Fischlin went on to write a dissertation (later a book) on the English lute song, a performance area in which he had specialized and has since become one of Canada's most prolific and acclaimed interdisciplinary scholars (with many books, several of them on music, numerous articles, and extensive webwork).
Fischlin has also studied percussion, and during a teaching exchange in Cuba worked extensively with traditional Afro-Cuban bata percussionists (from AfroCuba de Matanzas) in the La Marina community in Matanzas. He has been active with the Toronto free-improvising ensemble The Woodchoppers Association for a number of years and co-led a mission to Cuba with Woodchoppers members Dave Clark and Lewis Melville. Recent work has seen Fischlin contributing as a player to CDs by acclaimed Malian musician Jah Youssouf and the compilation CD Afghanistan…On Guard For Thee?
Fischlin has recorded most recently with the Vertical Squirrels, an instant composition, free improvisation collective he co-founded with Ajay Heble, Lewis Melville, and Rob Wallace. The Vertical Squirrels project sees Fischlin combining with long-time musical and academic collaborators as part of a lifelong commitment to improvisation, actual music, unexpected musical synergies, and the spirit in which they get created.
Views
Daniel Fischlin's research interests focus on modern culture and interdisciplinary studies, with an emphasis on the various connections between literature and music. Fischlin has written several books on human rights, social justice, and equity issues. In his book, he says missing that connection meant the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights has some significant gaps, including environmental rights and cultural rights. By leaving these out, it puts the responsibility on individuals to try to defend the environment and sustainability. It may well have been done deliberately because governments didn't want to take on these responsibilities.
But environmental rights are a fundamental precondition to all other rights. In his own words, cultural rights are also important because we are all born into a web of connections, which is what culture is, so we cannot define ourselves purely as individuals. He said: "The true measure of rights is how we treat the poorest and most marginalized people. It's not a matter of how we talk about their rights, but how those people actually live." He added: "Bringing community more fully into the rights discussion gives us vital new ways to interpret the world in a way consistent with American environmentalist Aldo Leopold's view that "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
Quotations:
"When rights are assigned to the individual, they ignore the idea that we are all interconnected, that we are all in relationships with each other as well as with the land and all living beings. This is not dismissing the individual, but recognizing that we are all part of a bigger codependent and co-generative world."
"Communities tend to run below the surface until a crisis galvanizes the people to respond."
Personality
As a pre-teen, Daniel Fischlin was smitten by all things stringed after hearing The Two Jimmys, and versions of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti, and The Mothers of Invention. Before he received his Bachelor's degree, he took lessons on flamenco, lute and classical guitar with the inspirational George Doxas in a church basement in Montreal, and with a number of other teachers in Canada, France, and the United States.