I was born in
Lone Pine, California, in 1947. Shortly thereafter, my father (who
had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II) enlisted in
the newly-formed United States Air Force. During his twenty three-year
career as a non-commissioned officer, he participated in the Korean
conflict and the Viet Nam War. He took his family with him on tours
of Bermuda, Japan, and Taiwan, and later (after I graduated from high
school) to Hawaii. This exposure to different cultures and landscapes
fostered in his eldest child a lifelong affection for "alternative
worlds" and especially for Asian philosophy and aesthetics.
My educational
background is already included in my introductory essay. My complete
curriculum vitae is also available online at my course
website, and a brief "profile" is included in my blog,
Owl's Farm. Suffice it
to say here that I have a B.A., magna cum laude, from the
University of Pennsylvania, where I concocted an independent major
in ancient history (with an undeclared minor in geology) and was elected
to Phi Beta Kappa in 1975 (nearly nine years after graduating from
high school, and initially matriculating at the University of California
at Riverside). I also studied ancient history, geology, and philosophy
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before finally
settling down into the intellectual history program at the University
of Texas at Dallas. I earned my M.A. in the History of Ideas in 1989,
and passed my Ph.D. exams in 1992. At some point after that, I abandoned
the quest for a doctorate because it was more fun to teach, create
websites, and pursue whatever interests arose out of a continuous
process of teaching and learning than it was to slog away at a dissertation.
My choice to
publish the results of my research as a novel, and to do so online,
came about as I worked through the ideas William Morris had articulated
over a century ago. It seemed only appropriate that because I mined
his ideas so liberally in my effort to create a twenty first-century
utopia, I should gain nothing from doing so other than to participate
in an ongoing conversation, one he initiated in the first place.
"Owlfarmer,"
by the way, is simply a translation of a German homonym of the
family name. My father suggested using it when I first began to mess
about on the web, and I've been playing with it ever since.