Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas

I was encouraged to make my first post to the Tower of Babel blog an introduction, so here’s a little bit about me.  My name is Jim Rovira.  I’m currently an Assistant Professor of English at Tiffin University in Tiffin, Ohio.  My dissertation, which I successfully defended last April (graduated with my Ph.D. last May), is about William Blake and Soren Kierkegaard.  I am actively publishing in my field.  My most recent publication is a book review of a recent Blake study for undergraduates for College Literature, and I’m currently reading two books on reception studies of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott for my next review.  I will be presenting on William Blake at the upcoming International Conference on Romanticism this coming November.

I live here in Tiffin with my wife Sheridan and two youngest children, Penn and Grace, but have four older children from a previous marriage in the Central Florida area. They are almost all grown; my youngest from my first marriage is going to be a senior in High School this coming academic year.

I’m a displaced Californian.  I lived the first seventeen years of my life in Southern California (I have an essay published on the Tower of Babel website about growing up in So. Cal.), the next seventeen in Florida, the next five around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area for graduate school, then back to Florida for four years to teach college in a full time, non-tenured position while I worked on my dissertation, and now to Ohio for my first Assistant Professor level job. You can get more details about me on LinkedIn.com and connect with me through jamesrovira (at) gmail (dot) com.

I hope to be posting here about the upcoming elections as I observe them happening in and around Ohio.  This, to me, involves writing a bit about Ohio –  I don’t think we can fully understand people’s attitudes without understanding the place where they live.  But the person writing needs to be understood as well: not just where that person lives, but where that person has lived.  What you need to understand about me is that until this last June I’ve lived 38 of my 43 years of life within twenty miles of either Disneyland or DisneyWorld.  So when my wife and I were driving from Tiffin to Fremont, watching mile after mile of corn, wheat, and soy fields, it made perfect sense that my wife would turn to me and say, “You’re going to lose your mind before I do.”

Maybe I already have!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at %1:%Jul %p and is filed under Articles, Cities, Humanity, Humor, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.