David Yaffe, assistant professor of humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, recently passed away at the age of 51. Yaffe taught undergraduate and graduate courses on 20th and 21st Century American fiction, poetry, music and creative nonfiction in A&S for nearly 20 years.

Throughout his career, Yaffe blended his interests in writing and music. A well-known music and arts critic, his work appeared in publications including The Nation, Harper’s, Slate, The New York Times, New York, The Village Voice, The New Republic, Bookforum and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Yaffe also authored three books: Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton, 2006), Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale, 2011) and the award-winning Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (Sarah Chrichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter offered a portrayal of music legend Joni Mitchell, based on his interviews with her and many of her friends and collaborators conducted from 2007 to 2016. It was named to Rolling Stone’s list of Top 10 Music Books of 2017, received the honor of Best History in the 2018 Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in the Best Research in Recorded Popular Music category and received a 2018 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award.

Yaffe's passion for the arts began at a young age. He honed his piano skills while studying at an arts high school in Dallas. His journey into music criticism began during his undergraduate years at Sarah Lawrence College, where he secured an internship with The Village Voice, a news and culture publication based in New York City. Driven by the desire to merge his writing and academic pursuits, Yaffe went on to pursue a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation research combined work as a jazz critic and as a literary scholar to explore how American writers represented jazz, culminating in his first book, Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing.

Before joining the faculty of A&S’ Department of English in 2005, Yaffe served as an adjunct instructor at CUNY Hunter College from 1997 to 2001 and as a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College from 2001 to 2002. Throughout his teaching career, he received several awards and honors, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, a CUNY Writing Fellowship, the Outstanding African American Studies Dissertation Award from the CUNY Graduate Center, a Gould Faculty Fellowship from Claremont McKenna College and a William Tolley Travel Grant from Syracuse University.