“A lifetime of helping people learn how to think about great works of literature and art has convinced me that there’s no way to learn to think well without undergoing a certain amount of struggle, hard work, and even humiliation before the word—humility and awe at the power of language we are trying to develop some small degree of mastery over, and which we only come to appreciate by wrestling with it, as Jacob did the Angel.” — DC
Academic Director
David spent his career teaching at the Santa Fe campus of SJC, joining the faculty there in 2000. He holds a BA in philosophy from Pomona College, an MA in philosophy from the Claremont Graduate School, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Davis. In addition to his teaching at SJC, he helped found the SJC Film Institute and has led visual arts and Great Books seminars for adults in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. He has written several volumes of poetry as well as monographs on aesthetics; cinema as a liberal art; the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; the poetics of William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Fernando Pessoa, and Gertude Stein; and the cinematic work of Sergio Leone and David Lynch. Contact David here.
Musician in Residence
Melissa studied the Arabic oud with Hamdi Başar in Ankara, Türkiye before transitioning to the lute and guitar. She plays a custom-built 4-course Medieval lute from the workshop of Vietnamese luthier Bruce Wei, a 6-course Renaissance lute by Turkish luthier Kamil Gül, and a guitar of unknown origin gifted to her by her father. She studied music theory in Israel and England. Contact Melissa here.
The Institute for Creative Inquiry 