 Hey, John, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you did before coming to UBC? I come from, I grew up in Manchester, England, and went to university there, and then the graduate work in the United States, and then I was teaching in Scotland and in England before coming here to UBC. Great. And why did you choose your particular area of study, Latin American studies, and can you tell us a little bit about your particular specialization? Well, Latin American studies was an accident, and I don't have any degrees in Latin American studies, or Spanish, or anything like that. I have one qualification, which is I did a first-year Spanish course, and I got an A-plus, so I'm very proud of that, but that's the only qualification I have to teach what I'm teaching. No, I studied English at undergraduate and masters, and I sort of was interested in theory and literary theory, mainly, cultural theory, and then I did, my PhD was in a program called a literature program, and early on the director of graduate studies sat me down and he says, this won't do, you will never get a job if all you do is theory. You need to pick a national literature. And I was very upset about this, but I said, okay, I'll do Latin American studies then. And he said, okay, now you have to go take some courses and learn something about Latin America. And I guess I chose in Latin America though, because I had been to Latin America. I went as a 17-year-old, 17-18-year-old, because I was sort of drawn, I don't know, to, on the one hand, piss off my parents, and on the other hand, to go to where there was a war. And so I went to Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala, I wandered around Central America for about nine months while the Central American Civil War was going on. So much later that sort of, I turned that, I suppose, into an academic interest. That's great. Can you tell us a little bit about your current research? At the moment, I'm doing a bunch of different things, but one of the things that I'm doing, and it relates to a couple of the texts that I'm going to be teaching, and that's one, is on ruins. This is a project I call American Ruins, which means Latin America and the United States and Canada. And so I've picked six ruins that seem interesting to me that range from an Inca ruin in the Andes to a theater in Detroit, to a head smashed in buffalo jump in southern Alberta, to a hospital in Chile, in Santiago de Chile, and a castle in Haiti, and a castle in Haiti as well. So they're interesting ruins because they're sort of the sites where you see the scars of history, I suppose. I'm interested in ruins because people always make telling stories about ruins, because they don't fully tell their own stories. Also, I'm kind of interested in philosophical, theoretical aspects of ruins. Should we view a ruin as a sort of absence, an indication of something that's gone, or should we see it as something that stubbornly persists and is kind of a positive presence where you didn't expect it to be here. So I guess most people talk about ruins, have thought about in terms of loss and absence, and I want to think about ruins in terms of stubborn survival, where you expect history to survive least. And can you tell us a little bit about your approach to teaching? I guess one of my general rules is that teaching is not about the teacher, and that it is not somebody supposed to know standing up and spouting from a position of some kind of authority. So I'm always kind of interested in destabilizing the kind of teacher-student relationship in different ways. I guess I've been interested over the last few years in the kind of technological ways of doing that, so that's why I sort of use blogs, and I've done an assignment on Wikipedia a few times and other things. These are all ways that, on the one hand, do just that sort of destabilize who's teaching whom, it's not always clear. And on the other hand, I like the notion that students are producing something that is worth producing. But the product is not the student themselves, the students are producers, I suppose. So for instance, in writing a blog, they're writing something that could be of interest, potentially at least to anyone who's interested in the topic that the student is writing on, or perhaps more obviously to an Wikipedia page, they're writing something for this vast public, this vast audience. And I want students to think at every different level, whether they're writing an essay, whether they're talking in a class, whether they're writing a blog, to realize that they have something to say. And then our job as teachers and instructors is to help them say it in an articulate manner as possible, and give them the sort of rhetorical and intellectual and other kind of weapons, I suppose, of tools, this is a less militaristic metaphor, to be able to express something that is theirs. Okay, how about what attracted you, Tarts One, to begin with, and what continues to attract you, Tarts One, keeps you here. I think the last one is fantastic. It is unique at this university at UBC, but it's also pretty special even on a wider sort of range of what gets done elsewhere. Partly because it is a place where disciplines don't matter. I suppose this relates to the fact that I don't fully fit within Spanish or American studies. I come from somewhere else, English, for instance, so I was unable to return to those kind of things. And to not think about how this fits within the department that I am or the discipline that I am, the disciplines are not majoring in anything yet right there. Interdisciplinary or pre-disciplinary, I suppose. I like the fact that we're co-teaching. I really like the co-teaching. And again, you're working with people who come from all these different backgrounds, philosophy, political science, music, classics, whatever. And I like that it's a chance to sort of think about some pretty fundamental issues. And you're given a lot of space and a lot of time. You really get to know the students because essentially I've seen students ten hours a week with the lectures, with the tutorials, with the seminars, with the officers and so on. And you're really working closely with the students on their essays and there's a lot of time for discussion and so on. So, yeah, it's great. I agree. Okay, can you tell us something about the books you're teaching this year so I can list them if you wish? I'm teaching some things that come out of the research that I'm doing. As I said before on ruins, I've got this little cluster on Haiti and I suppose that it's about... So, I've been working on these texts in terms of the way in which they deal with it, the optical ruin, this amazing thing. It's the biggest fortification or castle in the western hemisphere perched on this mountain, high above the plains of northern Haiti. In the context of the theme, which I'm very excited by by the way, the remake remodel, it's more thinking about the ways in which different authors, different writers have tried to think about or have been inspired by. This ruin and what it represents the Haitian Revolution. I've got this argument which I'll be trying in the lectures as well, I suppose. This ruin is at the origin on the foundation of 20th century Latin American literature, 20th century Francophone Caribbean literature and 20th century Anglophone literature. It is vital for all three of those. I'm going to try out those kind of things in the lectures and then the second semester I'll do a couple of texts that are much more new to me, shall we say. Things fall apart. You know Achebe and Apocalypse Now. They're not so much connected with my research but just... That's another thing I like about that one, I suppose. Endless challenge, right? We've been confronted with texts we don't know so well and we've got to think about for the first time not just even in new ways, right? How do I deal with this text? So that would be the challenge for the text that I'm teaching in the second semester. What are you looking forward to in the current year? I'm thrilled by this new theme. I think it's interesting that the remake remodel theme because we're kind of working with the kind of arts one model which has traditionally been sort of great books, western civilization but we're giving it a twist. So we're looking both at the kind of canonical, great books and then the ways in which they've been remade, remixed, redone and so on. We're also I guess we're giving a twist to what's usually a sort of kind of linear chronological account. You know, sort of Plato to whatever it's to, watchman in the case of the theme that I co-tort on last year. Here we're going to be consistently cycling back, which I think is interesting. I'm looking forward to working with a new team of instructors. I'm looking forward to a new bunch of students though I don't really get to see them till January for one reason or another, but that's okay. And I'm looking forward to the kind of experiments we might come up with the whole arts one digital thing. Last question, any advice for an incoming student of arts one or someone using the arts one digital website? Well, first of all, take it. If you're a prospective student, I think this is an unrivaled opportunity of spending a year thinking about some of these important questions and dealing with these great texts in a really kind of integrated, coherent manner. I think it really sets you up for the rest of your time at university, whatever subject you go on to do. I think for an incoming student, one of the things is don't be afraid. Again, this goes back to what I was saying, you have something to say. It is our job, the instructor's job, to help you say it. You'll find a really supportive atmosphere. Another thing that happens in arts one is you get to know your fellow students really well. You can kind of click as a team and I think that's something that people might, it might seem at the beginning that these are all your competitors and they know so much more than you, but I think you soon find that no, they're your allies and you can work together. I think that's something to think about. I mean, I think also the website, we're just putting all this material up there and there's so many different ways to use it and to sort of be imaginative and creative. That's something we try to do both here on campus and suggest we do it on campus. Think of connections between these texts, between these ideas, which is, I think that's what academic work is about a lot. EM Foster has this phrase at the beginning of Howard's End, only connect and I think that's, I've always liked that. Alright, well thank you very much, John. Thank you.