BiographY
I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Laurence Sterne at Swansea University, South Wales, U.K., under the supervision of the late Professor Cecil. J. L. Price, editor of the Oxford edition of the Collected Plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. I began my undergraduate degree in 1963, two years after the novelist, Kingsley Amis, left Swansea University for Cambridge. You will find a good account of some of my teachers in Chapter 9, "Swansea," of Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006).
In the 1970s I helped compile the notes to Volume 3 of the Florida University Press edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (published in 1984). I have published four books on Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865), the latest being Inventing Sam Slick: A Biography of Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
From 1970 until 2011, for forty one years, I had the privilege to be a member of the English Department at Acadia University. During that time, I was Director of Research and Graduate Studies at Acadia University between 1995 and 1998, and Chair of the English Department between 2000 and 2006.
Even though I taught eighteenth-century literature most years, one of my other teaching interests has been the short-story composite (also known as the short-story sequence or the short-story cycle). I still teach two online half-courses on this neglected sub-genre of the short story through Open Acadia. I enjoyed the challenge of introducing literature to first-year classes and still offer English 1406, Writing and Reading Critically, online.
I lived in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, for 35 of the 41 years I taught at Acadia University. From 1988 to 1993, I lived in Hall's Harbour, Nova Scotia, on the Fundy Shore, north of Kentville. I moved back there during the summer of 2010 in readiness for my retirement.
Upon my retirement, Acadia University made me a Professor Emeritus. I enjoy literary research and writing creatively. I've written three, as yet unpublished, comic/satiric novels about life at a small university.