Announcement: New Appointment - Daniel
Gallimore
The World Haiku Club is pleased to announce that
Daniel Gallimore, our Academic Director, has kindly agreed to take up an
additional position as Convener for WHCacademia with immediate effect. As
Convener, Daniel will be initiating debating sessions, chairing and overseeing
them so that the debating may be conducted effectively, orderly and
productively.
Fine academic, Daniel will also be linking
WHCacademia (and WHC as a whole indirectly) with scholars on haiku across the
world. By so doing, he will be playing an important part in creating a
long-waited and invaluable bridge between the community of haiku practitioners
(i.e. poets) and the community of academics. This bridge-building is an
important mission of WHC in various areas such as between haiku and other
branches of arts and literature, between haijin and general poets and between
haiku poets and the general public.
More generally, Daniel wishes to encourage lively
exchange of news, views or any other information which would be useful to
members, making WHCacademia a hunting ground for treasures where members can tap
for information they want, or conversely supply any information requested by
other members.
I will continue to operate the Kansho Column and
also be willing to help Daniel whenever he needs me. Together, we wish to
make WHCacademia more active, accessible and widely used.
I also wish to share what I regard as a great
piece of good news. Daniel has been asked to give a series of lectures on haiku
next term (Hilary Term, 8 weeks starting in January 2002) at Oxford University.
It is a tribute to Daniel's scholarship. Congratulations and good luck to
Daniel! This is also very good news for haiku and for us in the haiku community
in the sense that such an eminent university as Oxford has decided that haiku is
a worthy academic subject and that they will give the whole term (not just one
session) devoted to haiku.
Kengin,
Susumu
26/11/01
Daniel Gallimore was born in London in 1966, and
brought up in a village in North Buckinghamshire. After graduating from Oxford
in 1987 with a degree in English, he worked in Japan for three years on the
Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, two years in Saga Prefecture (where
Susumu also spent part of his youth) and one year in Tokyo. After spells with
the Japan Local Government Centre and Jiji Press in London and as a teacher in
Essex and Lincolnshire, he returned to Oxford in 1997 to research a doctoral
thesis on Japanese translations of Shakespeare's A Midsummer-Night's Dream,
which was finally completed this April. Since September 2000, he has been a
lecturer in Japanese at Oxford Brookes University. His interest in haiku began
in 1994 when he decided to write a hundred haiku each for the four seasons and
also read work by Issa and R.H. Blyth. In 2000, he organised a haiku day for a
mental health charity in Oxford called Tandem and a series of haiku workshops
for a local MIND day centre, as well as presenting a paper on haiku translation
at the World Haiku Festival 2000 London-Oxford 25-30 August 2000.
