A few words about me…
I am an author, a teacher and a researcher. Which comes first depends on the day and the tasks at hand.
I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Currently, I live in Vancouver, Canada, where I teach in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. For a partial list of classes I have taught or will be teaching, see here.
To date, I have published four books, the covers of which are shown above: Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas (U of Toronto P, 2007); Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2009); Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2010); Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Several of my essays have appeared in prestigious academic journals such as ELH, James Joyce Quarterly, Irish University Review, Partial Answers, while others have appeared in various edited academic collections.
I have also been a peer-reviewer for SSHRC and many academic journals and university presses.
I am a firm believer in the strong interrelationship between teaching, writing and research. Teaching is unfortunately viewed by many (but not all, obviously) academics as an inconvenience; and, as a result, research is often conducted with no thought for teaching (for more on this topic, see here). This, to me, is a great shame, which is why I have tried to practice what I preach throughout my career to date: all of my research publications, with the exception of my first book, have come directly out of the various courses I have taught over the years at UBC.
I am also a firm believer in academic and individual freedom and freedom of speech, which sometimes means having the freedom to challenge the cherished beliefs and entrenched ideas of others. Without such freedoms, teaching and learning are fundamentally impossible.
Of late, I have preferred to publish with trade-academic publishers, because I think it is important that whatever research one conducts should be communicated to an audience beyond the academic community, a community that grows more insular by the day.
My research interests are always evolving and cross-pollinating each other in ways that often surprise me. My earliest research interests were the crossovers of modernism–especially the works of James Joyce–and continental philosophy–in particular the work of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Giambattista Vico and Immanuel Kant. Some of my other earlier research interests were focused on the Northern Irish Troubles in conjunction with the work of Jacques Lacan and René Girard. My most recent research interests are reflected in my latest book, Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, and include technology and posthumanism/transhumanism, reason and unreason, digital humanities and informatics, as well as the crossovers of the humanities and the sciences.
I have several exciting writing and research projects currently on the go: I have begun working on a book on reason, unreason and the degradation of critical thinking in the humanities; I am also writing up and researching a project on posthumanism in James Joyce and Jacques Derrida; lastly, I am in the early stages of a digital humanities research project on digital reading, which is part of a larger project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All material published here is the product of my own personal opinion and academic freedom. I make no claim that any views expressed here reflect the views of UBC or any of its units.
Update, May 2020:
2019-2020 will be my last year teaching in the English department at UBC: after twenty years of teaching, I’ll be going back to school, which is nice, as I’ve always considered myself something of an eternal student.
Sadly, the same divisive identity-politicking and bad methodologies that have served to alienate the humanities from both reality (not to mention its fellow faculties) are now also sucking most of the good and all of the fun out of teaching in the humanities. Can there be a “humanities,” while insisting there is no such thing as a shared humanity? I don’t much like where all this is taking us…
This is a real pity.
I won’t miss myopic academic politics (surprisingly petty, usually toxic), but I’ll really miss teaching—my students in particular (most of you were awesome!). It’s hard not to see the humanities as being close to broken beyond repair, steered by ideologues who appear to think that doubling down on the very strategies that have being destroying the humanities is the way to “fix” them. I’m a firm believer that the humanities has now, perhaps more than ever, a great deal to learn from the intellectual rigour found in STEM subjects. I suppose I remain a true cross-disciplinarian. I even wrote a book about it!
Students new and old recognize the problems bedevilling the humanities; this is why certain subjects, such as English and “cultural studies,” struggle—and will continue to struggle—to attract students. I’ve lost count over the years of the number of students who feel that their experience as a humanities student has actually de-skilled them.
My conscience won’t let me continue.
Luckily, for me (and you), there’s still so much cool stuff out there to learn; but, for the time being, it is to be found outside of the humanities. I hope to be blogging about some of that stuff soon.
I reckon this also means I’ll be needing a new tag-line for this site…
Best, Peter.
Contact info:
I do not use any social media at all–Twitter, Facebook, etc.; anyone wishing to contact me can do so at: petermahon[at]protonmail.com
Peter Mahon 