Thomas Oliver Beebee, La Cañada, California, age 5	-- and in New York City, age 52. Same difference?

He had a steady job, and a pretty face, and everything seemed to fit:
But one day he could just feel the waste, so he put it all down and split.

I was born and raised in Southern California. That's why I live in Pennsylvania. When I first wrote that sentence years ago, I was thinking of the blackouts, Grey Davis, and the prospect of Ahnold as the Governator. Ahnold hasn't been that bad, you can hardly tell that he's a Republican. This year (2007) it was the fires that I managed to avoid. Having seen the tops cut off of hills so the developers could plant a few more houses there, I can understand why the area is so vulnerable.

Your fate is your blood. Despite my heavy involvement in theater and public speaking all through my adolescent years, upon entering college I tried breaking through to stability, telling myself I would go to law school, and that I would major in sociology so as to better understand the criminal mind. One semester into my Dartmouth program Dostoevsky and Shakespeare had helped me understand both the criminal mind and my own mind (assuming there is a difference), and had also convinced me that the the law had no room for its practitioners. (Only years later would I begin investigating my family history, and discover a long line of teachers, authors, and artists - some lawyers too, practicing mostly in Burlingame, Kansas.)

I chose Dartmouth because it was about the farthest I could get away from California, although later I taught for two years at Bowdoin, which is even farther away!

After Dartmouth, the University of Michigan, where I received my Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1984. I was fortunate enough to find employment for 1984, a replacement position in the German department at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, before I came to Penn State. I (still!) miss Bowdoin and Maine terribly (acknowledgments here to Steve Cerf, James Hodge, and Helen Cafferty, who helped me out so much), but also consider my position at Penn State ideal, because I am challenged to teach so many different kinds of courses: everything in German, from intermediate language to Adorno and Heidegger, Nietzsche and Wagner; history of criticism; contemporary theory; translation; freshman seminars where I can indulge my passion for epistolarity; Western Masterpieces and Inter-American literature for general education. If it weren't for these great opportunites I've been given not to specialize, I would have quit academia long ago.

Areas of Interest:

I have always been fascinated by letterature, that is, by narratives constructed out of correspondence. In such fictions, the letter has a dual function: it tells the story while at the same time creating it. All through my academic life I have been obsessed with explaining the letter's power. Along the way I have met other scholars who confessed to a similar passion, pursued as a hobby: one woman maintained a substantial collection of random letters found in the street. Recently I received a number of text messages (like, 27 of them) on my cell phone. Did I throw them away? They're now quotes in an academic paper ... (But do they belong to me, in terms of copyright?) I wanted to write my little history of epistolary fiction as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, but my advisor, Lincoln Faller, perspicaciously pointed out that it would take me a decade to finish that project, too long to survive on graduate wages (my first daughter, Palavina, was about to arrive in the world). So I took a small though significant slice of that history by examining the translations into German and French of Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa (1748). This work earned me my Ph.D. and was also eventually published as a Clarissa on the Continent.

I have finally compiled my investigation (terminated by exhaustion rather than completeness) in a volume entitled The Genealogy of Epistolary Fiction. In the future I hope to turn this book into a trilogy by analyzing Colonial Letters , which have the power of turning margin into center, and also "e-mail epistlemologies."

Seems like only yesterday I was teaching:

Comparative Literature 506: New World Apocalypse

The book that has grown out of that course is called Eschatechnologies, which will be published in 2008 by Oxford University Press.

Family lite: Myself (Daa), Palavina (Pepê), Chavaya (Daya), Jizelda (Mop), and Iggy

Growing up in a series of houses "under construction" by my father, I conceived a love of projects to-be-completed. During the course of my M.A. and Ph.D. work at Michigan, I went for breadth: various theory courses; German, English, French, and Spanish literature, and Russian language. My table is stacked with books with twenty pages left to finish; my computer is full of articles with two pages left to write. As this ferris wheel of side projects revolves, other things appear. One day I had a vision where I realized that a number of these projects were really about genre: Bob Dylan's apocalyptics; Samuel Richardson's legal realism; Claude LÉvi-Strauss's novelistic anthropology, etc. So I formed these essays into another book,The Ideology of Genre. I also somehow ended up translating a Chinese novel, Bai Hua's Remote Country of Women, with my former student Qing-yun Wu. It was a wonderful experience to finally visit China in June, 2004, for a conference co-sponsored by Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago.

At the conference, and on a 2007 trip to Taiwan, I read from my work-in-progress on transmesis, that is, fictional portrayals of translation situations.

Please explore the site--the samples of my work, the cold, hard facts of my educational and publishing history, my favorite quotes, or my picture gallery. And if you wish, please drop me a line .