Herbie Hancock, the highly regarded musician, composer, and educator, was named the 2014 Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. As the Norton Professor, Hancock will give a series of six lectures entitled “The Ethics of Jazz” during the spring semester. He currently is a professor of music at the University of California at Los Angeles and chair of the university’s Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
“It is a great privilege to welcome Herbie Hancock as the Norton Professor,” said Homi Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. “His unsurpassed contribution to the history of music has revolutionized our understanding of the ways in which the arts transform our civic consciousness and our spiritual aspirations. It would be no exaggeration to say that he has defined cultural innovation in each decade of the last half century.”
The Norton Professor of Poetry position was established in 1925 at Harvard. Among the previous holders of the post are T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and Leonard Bernstein.
