Some of you already know that I have an English accent that sounds like it was bought in a cheap antique shop - perhaps I should take a moment to explain how I got this way.  I was born in a village outside of Oxford, which had three main features of interest:  a pub (The Bear & Ragged Staff, which I was too young to discover), a duckpond, and a copse of trees celebrated by Matthew Arnold (in "The Scholar Gipsy," which I wrongly guessed when trying out for Jeopardy, making me the only future Chair of English to lose the opportunity to appear on the show by missing a Literature question).  We lived in an old manor house called Cutts End, which I only later discovered was not, as I thought, the original article, but a 20th century knockoff by a man called Clough-Ellis, making it the perfect starting point for the fake Englishman that I would eventually become.  We left England in 1974, having sold our collective children's items (there were three of us) for the princely sum of $300, which we promptly spent on arrival in Boston at Lechmere's on three orange bicycles.  They were all stolen in the first week, leaving me with a lifelong respect for bicycle locks.  I managed to keep my English accent, out of a combination of nostalgia and elementary biology (13 year olds, I am told confidently by sociolinguistic friends at parties, generally keep their native accents as their voices change), and have been clinging on to it for dear life ever since.  

When I arrived at Ohio State in 1987, I had spent exactly half my life in England; at this time of writing, I have spent exactly half my life in Columbus, Ohio, a place I had never heard of when I was growing up.  (Life plays funny tricks on you sometimes:  who could have guessed, knowing that fiercely British schoolboy, that I would be so happy here?)  It took me far too long in my academic career to realize why I studied the British modernists - no other period in British literature is more determined or more eloquent in its love of a lost past.  At the same time, modernism is a period of multiple voices, dazzling variety, and dizzying intelligence - I think of America (you may be surprised to hear this, but it is not unusual in transplanted academics) in the same way.  Certainly the English Department at Ohio State is polyphonic and polymathic, mirroring the kaleidoscope (Joyce would have said “collideorscape”) of English studies today.  I am proud and delighted to be a part of this extraordinary place.  Denney Hall, for better or worse, is my America, a hometown that is both a village (without the pub, sadly) and a new found land.  Now if we could only build a duckpond...

Sebastian D. G. Knowles
Professor and Chair of English
The Ohio State University