Draft:James Helgeson

James Helgeson (born 1966 in Illinois) is an American and Italian classical musician. He is Dean of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, a Berlin music conservatory, where he is also Professor of Composition and Musicology.

Career
Helgeson is a composer and Renaissance scholar, and Dean of Daniel Barenboim's Berlin conservatory. He holds a senior and permanent professor post within the German system alongside the deanship.

Helgeson oversees a program for 90 undergraduates and approximately 20 post-graduates, bringing together musicians from the Middle East, associated with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The Barenboim-Said Akademie as such is a bachelors and masters degree granting university located in a 35 million dollar Frank Gehry designed building in Central Berlin, where student scholarships are supported by the German Foreign Office. Faculty in the Dean's departments include pianist Andras Schiff, cellist Frans Helmerson, and composer Jörg Widmann.

Helgeson studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, and holds two doctorates in humanities and music, from Princeton University and Royal Holloway University of London. Previously, he taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Nottingham, and was a fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge.

He is the author of several monographs in French Renaissance studies, specialising in the relationship between music and literature in the period before 1600, including Harmonie Divine et Subjectivité Poétique chez Maurice Scève (Droz, 2001) and The Lying Mirror (Droz, 2012). . He is also the author of an edited volume published by the University of Edinburgh on Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is a member of the Société Française d'Etude du Seizième Siècle (French Society for the Study of the 16th-century).