John Dwyer

Professor, Division of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

John Dwyer is now retired and experiencing to the joys of lethargy. He hails from British Columbia, which is a heck of a lot nicer place to come from than Toronto. John reluctantly came to Ontario to teach in 1985 and ended up at York. Despite the climate, he liked York University a lot because it has as diverse a student body as the University of Toronto without being anywhere near as stuffy. John taught many courses in many different Departments at York but towards the end of his career he found a home in the Humanities Department where he taught a course entitled The Modern Age, whatever that means. For him, it meant Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and other notable depressives. His other undergraduate course was a third year offering called Ideas of Love, which argued that romantic love was a complex and strange evolution whose future is, at best, problematic. Past partners and friends suspect that John may be rationalizing his own failures as a lover. John also developed several graduate courses, including one entitled The Enlightenment Project, which paired off eighteenth-century writes like Rousseau and Hume with postmodern critics and interpreters like Derrida and Deleuze. Tres cool. [read more...]