Pianist Shichao Zhang holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance and Literature, with a minor in Chamber Music and Accompanying, at the prestigious

Eastman School of Music, under the tutelage of Professor Douglas Humpherys and Professor Jean Barr. During his time at the Eastman, he played an important role as a teacher in various capacities at Eastman, including the Primary/Secondary Piano Program, Class Piano Teacher, and a Studio Teaching Assistant. Dr. Zhang’s dedication and teaching led to his recognition with the 2013-2014 Eastman Teaching Assistant Prize.

Zhang received his Bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance at Eastman, graduating with summa cum laude in 2012, accompanied by the esteemed Eastman Humanity Prize (GPA 4.0/4.0). He continued his musical pursuit by obtaining a Master’s degree in Piano Performance and Literature at Eastman in 2014. Zhang’s achievement was recognized by the Pi Kappa Lambda, a National Music Honor Society. Originally from China, Zhang received his early training in Beijing, where he studied under the guidance of Madam Yafen Zhu and Ms. Chen Zhang.

Zhang has won numerous prizes in competitions including the Hong Kong (Asia) Piano Open Competition, the Eastman School of Music Concerto Competition, the New York MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competition, the 2011 Jefferson Symphony International Young Artists Competition, the Iowa International Piano Competition and the Metropolitan International Piano Competition. His playing has been praised as “Mr. Zhang has excellent technique and is a very probing musician...” “Shichao’s performances reflect a great musicality, depth of interpretation, and technical expertise…”

Zhang’s musical journey has taken him around the world, with solo recitals, chamber-music concerts, and concerto performances throughout China, the United States, and Europe. Notable venues include the China National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Forbidden City Concert Hall, the National Library of China Concert Hall, the Eppley Auditorium and Orpheum Theatre in Sioux City, Iowa, and the Rialto Center for the Arts in Atlanta. In New York State, he has performed frequently at Eastman Theater, Eastman Kilbourn Hall, as well as the Geneva Smith Center for the Arts, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music (NYC), and WXXI 91.5 radio. Zhang has premiered compositions by contemporary composers, including Xin Huguang, Xue Jin, and Julian Cochran. His expertise extends to adjudicating various competitions, including the 3rd Macau-Asia Pacific Youth Piano Competition, the 18th Hong Kong (Asia) Piano Open Competition, the Prime Golden Bell Music Award of China, the Jiangxi Preliminary of the 3rd Kyoto International Music Competition.

Dr. Zhang joined the faculty at Eastern Illinois University in 2023, and is a Visiting Professor at the Heilongjiang University of Technology in China. He has been a full-time Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Music Department of Skidmore College, where he taught a full studio and coached chamber music. In addition, Zhang has taught and coached solo piano and chamber music for students from the Eastman School of Music, Ithaca College School of Music, East Tennessee State University, Morningside College, Minzu University School of Music (Beijing, China), etc.

His students have been accepted by schools such as Boston College, Boston University, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Cleveland Institute of Music, DePaul University, Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, Ithaca College, Juilliard School, Longy School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Peabody Institute, San Francisco Conservatory, Temple University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, among others.

In addition to his teaching and performing commitments, Dr. Zhang proudly serves as the Festival Manager of the Amalfi Coast Music & Arts Festival in Italy, and the Festival Coordinator of the Gijón International Piano Festival in Spain.

Dr. Andrian Del Caro’s field specialties are German and Austrian literature and thought from the Enlightenment to the present; philosophy and literature; romanticism; poetics; Nietzsche; translation.

Dr. Del Caro’s interdisciplinary teaching and research span the late eighteenth century to the present. He is drawn to figures and issues from the Age of Goethe, the fin-de-siècle, and generally those poets and thinkers whose works reveal a special affinity for the earth. His book in progress is a treatment of Goethe’s earth spirit (Erdgeist). Favorite courses over the years have been cross-listed with humanities, philosophy, comparative literature, and include the Faust-theme, Nietzsche, literature in the Age of Goethe, and nature and environment in German literature and thought.

Dr. Del Caro’s monographs include Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (LSU Press, 1989); Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being (Wayne State UP, 1991, 2017); Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Poets and the Language of Life (LSU Press, 1993); The Early Poetry of Paul Celan: In the beginning was the word (LSU Press, 1997); Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth (De Gruyter, 2004). He is co-editor with Janet Ward of German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity (UP of Colorado, 2001, 2002), and co-editor with Robert Pippin of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge UP, 2006), for which Del Caro is the translator. He was a major contributor of translations for The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Hermann Glaser (Continuum, 1981), and for Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Cambridge UP, 2001). Del Caro’s translations also include Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil / On the Genealogy of Morality (Stanford UP, 2014); Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena 2 (Cambridge UP, 2015, 2017); Nietzsche’s Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885 – Spring 1886)(Stanford UP, 2019). Del Caro is co-editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche published by Stanford University Press.

Articles by Adrian Del Caro have appeared since 1980 in journals and edited volumes, the most recent of which appear below:

• “Nietzsche and Romanticism: Hölderlin, Goethe, Wagner” Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson. Oxford UP, 2013. 108-33. 
• “Zarathustra vs. Faust, or Anti-Romantic Rivalry among Superhumans,” Nietzsche on Art and Life, ed. Daniel Came. Oxford UP, 2014. 143-63.
• “Intertextuality, Gender, and Teaching ‘German’ in English,” in Translation and Translating in German Studies: A Festschrift for Raleigh Whitinger, ed. John L. Plews and Diana Spokiene. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016. 77-96.

Dr. Del Caro has refereed manuscripts for Modern Austrian Literature; Colloquia Germanica; Women in German Yearbook; Seminar; Journal of the History of Ideas; PMLA; Mosaic; Philosophy and Rhetoric; Journal of Nietzsche Studies; English Studies in Canada; ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Culture, Theory and Critique; Goethe Yearbook; Nietzsche-Studien; Bloomsbury Academic; Edinburgh University Press; Syracuse University Press; SUNY Press; Fairleigh Dickinson UP; Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences ASPP; Cambridge UP.

“I have always been intrigued by the ability of the avant-garde to move society forward. This aspect of art and its interdisciplinary nature form the basis of my research. My explorations include the nexus of visual and literary culture in turn-of-the-century Vienna and Munich, the deconstruction of visual theatricality and stereotypical perception in American photography and film and the representation of disability in art history.”

Timothy W. Hiles received his Ph.D. from Penn State University where his studies emphasized the early modern movement in Germany and Austria and the history of photography. His recent research encompasses visual perception within twentieth-century American photography and film and the representation of disability in historical and contemporary art. Among his publications are Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (1996); “Klimt, Nietzsche and the Beethoven Frieze,” Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts (1998); “Reality and Utopia in Munich’s Premier Magazines,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013); “Shifting Perception: Photographing the Disabled During the Civil Rights Era,” Review of Disability Studies (2014); “The Art of Becoming: The Symbiosis of Time, Space and Film in Pull My Daisy,” Gotthold Lessing’s Legacy: Space and Time in Artistic Practices and Aesthetics (2017); and “Representing Disability in Post-World War II Photography,” Disability and Art History (2017).