Merce Cunningham will appear in the Stanford Presidential Lecture Series in conversation with John Rockwell.

Rockwell is the chief dance critic of The New York Times. At The Times he has been a classical music critic and reporter (1972-1991), chief rock critic (1974-80), classical music editor (1980-91), principal classical recordings reviewer (1992-94), Paris-based European cultural correspondent (1992-94), editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section (1998-2002), and senior cultural correspondent and arts columnist (2002-4).

From 1994 to 1998 he left The Times to become the founding director of the Lincoln Center Festival, a summer international festival in New York.

Born in Washington, D.C., he was raised there; in Berlin, Germany; and in San Francisco. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.; Harvard College; the University of Munich; and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in German cultural history, with a dissertation on opera reform in Berlin during the 1920s.
In 1969 at the Oakland (California) Tribune and from 1970-72 at the Los Angeles Times, Rockwell was a classical music and dance critic and reporter. He had studied dance with Anna Halprin in San Francisco in the late '60s, and subsequently appeared as the Mouse King in the Danbury, Connecticut, annual production of "The Nutcracker" in 1991.

A Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters, Rockwell has served six-year terms on the advisory board of the College of Letters and Sciences at U.C. Berkeley and on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University.

Books by John Rockwell

An active freelance writer and contributor to music encyclopedias, Rockwell is the author of three books: All American Music (1983), about contemporary composition in all genres of music, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Sinatra: An American Classic (1984); and The Idiots (2003), a monograph on Lars von Trier's film for the British Film Institute. He and Virgil Thomson also edited The Virgil Thomson Reader, which won a National Book Critics Circle award.

The Idiots (2003)

All American Music (1983)

Sinatra: An American Classic (1984) .