I first visited a large research library in the summer of 1980 when I was nineteen. It was the Library of the University of Edinburgh in the central George Square area not far from the David Hume Tower, then home to the Faculty of Arts. Ever since that summer I have felt an overriding fascination for books, not only for the scholarship contained in them but also for their physical shapes, their precise geometry of learning. The outcome of that experience is that I have spent a substantial part of my life among stacks, mainly those in the libraries of the University of Edinburgh, University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, National Library of Scotland, University of Cambridge, University of East Anglia, Northwestern University at Evanston, University College Dublin, National Library of Ireland, Universität Leipzig, University of Birmingham, Ohio State University, State University of New York at Albany, etc.

Of late, my research has focused on the textual intricacies of Henry James's dramatic adaptations as conditioned by the fin-de-siècle literary market and his own ambivalent attitude towards the theatrical experience. But faithful to my life-long interest in the narrative text and its meaning-making strategies, I am currently working on the constitution and functioning of fictional minds with the aid of notions such as aspectuality, metarepresentation, extended cognition, and distributed identity, which were first developed by cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind and later adapted to the study of fictional consciousness by cognitive narratology. Specifically, I am focusing on how the identities of absent or effaced characters are socially constructed in a group of Henry James's short stories that could be precisely characterized as tales of absent or effaced protagonists for the simple reason that their alleged central figures are seldom, if ever, directly available to the reader and mostly exist as sets of consensual or conflicted images lodged in the minds of other inhabitants of the storyworld. I think this path merits further exploration and I would be happy to participate in collective projects or international research groups directly or indirectly related to the field of enquiry just described.