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There were two peepholes inside the airlock - with yellow eyes pressed to them. There was a speaker on the wall. The Tralfamadorians had no voice boxes. They communicated telepathically. They were able to talk to Billy by means of a computer and a sort of electronic organ which made every Earthling speech sound.

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions?"

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes," said Billy, in fact, he had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Kurt Vonnegut (1969)Slaughterhouse-Five. New York, NY: Laurel Books, pp. 76-77.

Some Personal Details

I hail from the town of Sutton-in-Ashfield, which is in Nottinghamshire, England, 3 hours drive North from London and Exit 28 off the M1 motorway. People in Sutton greet each other with the phrase "Ah ya awrait me duck?" which, roughly translated means "are you alright, my duck?" Why we refer to each other as "ducks" I am not quite sure. This is me when I was a baby sometime in 1961, looking quite a duck.

My bachelors degree in Communication Studies was earned from Sheffield City Polytechnic (which is now known as Sheffield Hallam University) in 1983. My mentors there were Dr. Patrik Holt (pictured here) and Dr. Guy Fielding. In Sheffield, being in the great county of Yorkshire, people greet each other with the phrase "Ah thee awrait luv?" At the end of my studies at Sheffield, through a totally random chain of events, I ended up at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale where I earned a Masters Degree in Speech Communication and studied with the likes of Tom Pace, Stanley Deetz, and Richard Lanigan. I earned my Ph. D. in Communication, Information, and Library Studies from Rutgers University in 1991 where my doctoral dissertation was chaired by Stanley Deetz.

I was hired as an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University in September 1999. Before that, I spent nine years working in the Department of Communication at William Paterson University. I teach courses in interpersonal communication (particularly the social constructionist perspective of W. Barnett Pearce and John Shotter), research methodology, and communication theory (particularly cultural studies and other European approaches).

My research interests are concerned with philosophical and critical treatments of communication processes, drawing widely from the work of Michel Foucault. I am also very interested in subliminal persuasion; that is, persuasion by messages presented below the limen of conscious awareness. My dissertation was partly based on this idea, but I focused primarily on the concept of "the threshold" and the role it came to play in psychological discourse from the 17th Century onwards. It is here that I drew my inspiration from Foucault (and Stan Deetz!). However, I am also interested in subliminal persuasion as a phenomenon of popular culture, and, if you click on the link, you can read a short article I wrote on the subject in 2006.

My interests include playing rhythm and lead guitar with the enigmatic blues/rock combo The Professors. This is a picture of me (left), Bob Kubey, and Tomasz Imielinski, the founding members of the band, wailing away at William Paterson's "University Day" celebrations in September 1997. If you click on the Professors link above, you can see even more great pictures like this one, plus get all the latest gig news and merchandise.

In June 1989, I married Marie Hein, my very own "Jersey Girl," and our daughter Meg was born in August 1990. Click here for the inevitable family picture.

And that's probably much more than you really wanted to know, right?

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