Home | Away

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Identification papers

I’m the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University. Born in New York City (specifically, on 2nd St and Avenue C) in September 1961, I grew up mainly in Flushing, Queens, where I lived until moving to some of the least attractive apartments in the Columbia neighborhood in 1978. I received my B.A. in English from Columbia in 1982 and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986 and 1989, respectively. In 1983, a few weeks after moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, I met Janet Lyon; we married in 1985, had our first child, Nick, in 1986, got jobs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, had our second child, Jamie, in 1991, and then moved to Penn State in July 2001.

This site carries announcements, a couple of photographs (more coming soon), and links to about 70 of my essays published in various venues-- available here via links and pdfs. And when I get a raft of mail in response to an essay, then this thing really comes in handy.

The “essays” section is the most extensive and active part of the site; whenever I publish a new essay, whether it’s in an academic or a general journal (American Literature, Dissent, NYTimes Magazine, etc.), I’ll post a notice about it here and provide the url and full info on the “essays” page. To read some of my essays, you need to be working from a computer in the .edu domain in order to be granted access to academic journals catalogued in JSTOR or Project MUSE; for some of them you need to be a subscriber to the Chronicle of Higher Education. For many of those, however, I’ve provided .pdf versions that give you my original manuscript (as conformed, after editing, to the final published version).

When I’m not writing or teaching, I play ice hockey in a local league and serve as an assistant coach on Jamie’s “Challenger League” baseball team (see family pix). I used to play drums in a variety of bands going back to college (when I played behind David Terhune and Larry Gallagher in a band called Normal Men-- Terhune is now, with Joe McGinty and Kris Woolsey, running a brilliant outfit known as the Kustard Kings, house band of the Losers Lounge in NYC, and Larry’s great debut CD, An Endless Chain of Accidents, just came out this past summer; check out Larry’s website here). But these days the best drummer in the house is Nick. His drum teacher didn’t know who Keith Moon was, but we’ve fixed that.

Posted by Michael on 01/07 at 04:12 AM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages