“a little passport is my life”
— E.E. Cummings
My name is David Farley: I hold a PhD in English Literature from the University of Tulsa, where I studied modernist literature and was book review editor for the James Joyce Quarterly. I have published on such figures as William Butler Yeats, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West. My book, Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad explores the connections between modernist literature and travel writing.
I've been teaching at St John's since the founding of the Institute for Writing Studies in 2006.
The connections between literature, travel, writing, and teaching continue to be the focus of my professional identity. I am currently working on a book length project that further examines the importance of travel and travel writing to modernity, from the rise of the novel (Daniel Defoe) to more contemporary figures (W.G. Sebald) in order to understand how writers "saw" in certain historical and cultural contexts and how the travel book contributed to these ways of seeing.
I live with my wife, Johanna, and my daughter Lucy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
My pedagogical and research interests involve the experiences and textual representations of travel, with all of the materialist and metaphorical meanings that connotes. As you will see, I have designed my writing courses in recent years around students' experiences of travel (whether their own or with Study Abroad), the literature of travel, and, most importantly, the mechanisms and bureaucracy of travel.
My courses all focus in one way or another on travel and travel writing. For instance, inspired by Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos, I have centered a class on the document of the passport, presenting it as a rich and multi-layered interface between students and the world, as I ask them to reclaim this document for themselves.
Together, these two documents -- the portfolio and the passport -- can better help us understand the richness and importance of writing, as we try together to get to where we are going.