Sullivan, Brad 1961-

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Sullivan, Brad 1961-

PERSONAL:

Born September 7, 1961, in Richmond, VA; son of David L. III and Margaret Sullivan; married Donna L. Beck, 1994; children: Luke, Mariah. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: University of Virginia, B.A. (cum laude), 1983; Ball State University, M.A., 1992, Ph.D., 1997; attended Emory University, 1985-87. Hobbies and other interests: Long walks, basketball, reading.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Box 5155-H, Western New England College, Springfield, MA 01119.

CAREER:

Freelance writer, 1984-87; University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, adjunct faculty, 1987, 1988; Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, assistant professor of English, 1996-2001; University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, visiting assistant professor of English, 2002-03; Western New England College, Springfield, MA, associate professor of English, 2003—. Conference participant.

MEMBER:

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Modern Language Association of America, National Association of Teachers of English, American Conference on Romanticism, Phi Beta Kappa.

WRITINGS:

Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships among Minds, Worlds, and Words, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor to scholarly periodicals, including Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Papers on Language and Literature, and Journal of Consciousness Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Brad Sullivan once told CA: "My writing emerges from my compulsion to learn and to facilitate the learning of others, to articulate and share what Gregory Bateson called ‘patterns which matter.’ In my experience as a parent, a student of rhetoric and literature, a teacher-scholar, a music lover, and a sports lover, I have found that learning is a prerequisite for success and joy in all these area of life. I do not mean formulaic learning, which assumes that the knowledge already exists ‘out there’ and can simply be absorbed, but learning that strives toward renewal and re-vision. As a result, I write about learning and learn as I write.

"My book on Wordsworth represents an attempt to learn from him, and to facilitate the process of learning from him. The book focuses on his effort to develop a model of knowing and learning that runs counter to our Western ‘objective’ model by focusing on relationship, negotiation, and revision rather than controlled experience, isolation of contributing factors, and removal of all personal elements from knowledge. He, like Robert Frost, believed that poetry plays a key role in learning. Only through poetry—the language of experience and metaphor—do we come to connect one thing with another and to relate to the experiences of others.

"I write about how and why science has emerged as the discourse of knowledge in our culture, about how and why poetry has been peripheralized—becoming an ‘ornamental discourse’—and about how we can reconnect the two to create a better model of knowing and learning for the future. I hope to contribute, as much as possible, to the most important task before us at the start of the twenty-first century: to help bridge the chasms between ourselves and the natural world, ourselves and other creatures, ourselves and our human communities, that have been created by a dangerous model of knowing."