In the course of research into the Western history of the shifting nature and experience of emergency since the 1750s, Hillel Schwartz explores worlds of jeopardy and alarm--oceanic and atmospheric, bellicose and pacific, plebeian and patrician, prudential and psychomachian. 

Hillel Schwartz is a cultural historian, poet, and translator who has published at length with Zone books on noise and sound, copies and kinesthetics, fantasies of the body and of millennial transformation. In 2014 he was Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

The 2015 Proseminar in the Master of Visual Studies is a public series of lectures revolving around the methodology of Fieldwork, presenting artists, architects, curators, researchers, and historians that critically think through spatial concepts of conflict where the public and private overlap as fields under tension and compression. The series includes talks and workshops with Eyal Weizman, Trevor Paglen, Laura Kurgan, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Hillel Schwartz. The series is moderated by Charles Stankievech, assistant professor of Visual Studies at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.