The formal bit:
Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Sheffield, where I have been teaching since 1990. I am also the Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies (does this mean this is a Bloch-blog? Now, there’s an idea!) The Centre is really taking off and prominent intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek, Juergen Habermas, Fred Jameson, Tom Nairn, Juergen Moltmann, Jan Robert Bloch (yes, yer man’s son) have lent their support. Indeed I am editing a book on Bloch called Ernst Bloch and the Privatisation of Hope for which Zizek is writing the introduction and he is also going to be publishing it in a series with Duke University Press. My main interests are German politics, philosophy and economics and in 2005 I published a book on the ex-communist party in Germany entitled The Crisis of the German Left.
The less formal bit:
Chequered career background; Born 1960, I left school at the age of 15, having been to some 11 or 12 schools, amongst which were some of the worst in the land – Whitehawk County Secondary was the low-point I think. Having said that, it was where I first got into playing music and took up the cornet in the school band. My mother was a singer and had some fame in the 1960s when she was ina a band called The Second Generation with Elaine Paige etc. I decided at age 11 that it would be good to join the army as a bandsman. Did so at 16, not before almost missing the opportunity because of convictions for driving a car with no tax insurance, MOT nada at the age of 15 I think, around then anyway. The judge let me off with a fine and a ban because I already had my place in the Army and he didn’t want to jeopardise that. So 5 years in the Army 1976-1981 playing double-bass and Tuba, three years of it in Germany, where I learnt both the guitar and Green politics, drifted towards Marxism and soon found my ideas kind of incompatible with being in the Army. Not least because I shifted over to supporting Irish republicanism, which took a bit of a jolt when I was blown out of my bed in Dortmund Barracks by a large IRA bomb. Left the Army in 1981 and got a job as a lorry driver with the gas board and spent 2 years driving loads of tarmac round the Isle of Wight and filling in the holes left by other cowboys. Got married in 1982 to Janet and had two sons (in 1985 and 1989). In 1983 I was made redundant and with my guitar and a pretty convincing German accent I managed to get ona a course at Portsmouth Polytechnic studying for a degree in German politics and then a post-grad award to carry on doing so in 1987 and then in 1989 went to Nottingham University to work for David Childs for a year and then in 1990 started at Sheffield… which takes us back to the formal bit above. I left Jan and the boys in 1997 and since 2000 I have been with Karen, Reader in German at Oxford University, living in Oxford and we have a lovely 4 year old daughter caled Rosa (of course). So, thank you Whitehawk County Secondary School – “it’s an ill wind” and all that.
The very informal bit:
I am somewhat chaotic and lazy though (I am told) inspiring teacher. Some call me charismatic, others just an annoying drunkard. I am a terrible flirt (that means I am actually good at it, which is terrible), like a drink and a smoke (though I have given up the latter apart from when I have had the former, which I have more or less stopped now as well) I worry about being 47 though secretly I love it and feel as thoguh as I am becomig who I am, which is a human becoming rather than a being. I fear that I am a classic mid-life criser, wondering whether I am still attractive to younger women, trying to keep my rising blood-pressure and cholestorol levels down by exercising and losing weight. I am a song writer who has never sold any songs, a novelist who has never finished writing his novel, an ex-marxist who doesn’t really know what to make of the world any more, a man who wishes to 1. live forever and 2. die happy. Generally I am every 47 year-old man, apart from the ones who aren’t like me. I am happy, yes, very happy actually and if things stay like this I will at least achieve aim 2. above, if not 1.
That’ll do for now.
