Welcome to the Magical Humanist
Who am I?
I’m a professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I’ve been teaching since 2005. I’m first and foremost an Americanist specializing in post-WWII literature and culture. I am, however—to borrow an expression from one of my favourite grad school professors—intellectually promiscuous. There’s little I’m not interested in, and it’s very easy to pique my curiosity. My teaching and research interests range from postmodernism and contemporary fiction, to film and television, to such topics as conspiracy narratives and paranoia, post-apocalyptic literature and cinema, genre formation, the ever-present “crisis” of American masculinity, the ostensible end of history, science fiction and fantasy … and, really, whatever happens to capture my attention. I’m basically an academic version of the dog from Up.
I live in St. John’s, Newfoundland with my wife Stephanie and our three cats, Bartleby, Gloucester, and Catesby.
Everything you read here is the product of my own mind. I can’t promise to be brilliant, but I will never, ever use artificial intelligence to write, structure, or brainstorm my essays.
What is Magical Humanism?
In the last ten years or so I’ve shifted focus in my research and teaching to accommodate my life-long love of speculative fiction and fantasy. Magical humanism is a concept emerging from an idle question I asked some time ago: how is that so much contemporary fantasy, a genre that emerges from a profoundly religious sensibility, tends now to articulate largely secular worldviews?
Magical humanism is, in part, an attempt to redress the problems with our various historical humanisms without abandoning its basic promise. I am deeply invested in humanism, both in terms of being devoted to the humanities (which is, after all, what I do for a living), and to a capacious concept of humanity.
Where, you ask, does that magic come in? Well … that’s something I’ll be writing about most of the time I’m posting in this space . It’s a broad question with iterative answers.
