Frederic Svoboda:  

Life I have been at UM-Flint since 1980. Before then I taught at Michigan State University in the departments of American Thought and Language, and English, from which I earned my degrees. My areas of academic interest include all periods of American Literature (though with an emphasis on Modernism), American Culture & Popular Culture, textual editing, and fiction writing. I teach courses in all these areas from time to time. I've written or edited several books and numerous articles, and have served as Chair of English and as Director of the Master of Liberal Studies Program in American Culture. During the 2005-06 academic year I served as Senior Advisor to Chancellor Mestas, and I currently am again chairing English and serving as chair of faculty council. Among other activities, I recently served as treasurer of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, an educational non-profit that shares rights to a number of that author’s works. My immediate family includes my wife, Jerri Gillett, sons Joseph and Daniel, and Roxy the golden retriever. Our previous retriever Zoe died in August 2008 after being diagnosed with cancer in January. Jerri manages a lab in Michigan State University’s Department of Plant Pathology, “killing plants for science” as we usually describe it. The lab actually specializes in the control of diseases of Michigan small fruits via natural means (minimizing the use of pesticides), and during the busy summer season she will be coordinating multiple research teams that crisscross Michigan in several pickup trucks, communicating by cell phone and also monitoring field conditions via remotely operated computerized weather stations. It’s about as different from literary study as you can get, which saves arguments about which of us is more successful. We have been married since 1979 and traditionally quarrel only on our anniversary, December 15, which we usually manage to forget in the press of holiday preparations. Lately we seem to be forgetting to quarrel even then. My past students may remember me as having characterized Jerri as “50 going on 30.” Since from time to time she has to go into the lab at midnight to shake all the test tubes three times, we live in Meridian Township, about a mile and a half from MSU. (Carpooling helps keep me sane.) Joseph graduated from MSU majoring in Geographic Information Science, essentially highly sophisticated computerized mapping. He now works at AEW, a civil engineering/architecture firm in the north suburbs of Detroit. I generally have described Joseph as “a little [now big] Fred clone,” which doesn’t make him happy but is pretty accurate. Like me he is a non-morning person but has learned t...Expand for more