James Joyce Quarterly

It's both wonderful and strange to be back. Yet it seems I was hardly away. After leaving the academy (temporarily) to learn and practice the law, I watched (from the safe distance of a law office) my friend and colleague Sean Latham take the helm of the JJQ and sail the journal to new regions and glories. And he sailed for twenty years—ten more than my first tour of duty and only five fewer than Tom Staley's inaugural voyage. Sean has been a creative, ambitious, enterprising editor with a sense of humor and a gift for timing. An editor needs both: humor to stand apart when necessary from the press of journal demands, and timing to know when to do and not to do things. He will be as hard an act to follow as he was to precede. During Sean's editorship, I remained a friend, advisor, and contributor to the JJQ, especially after I returned to The University of Tulsa as a law professor in 2008. I now hold an endowed chair in the Law College here and am delighted to report that I was recently voted a courtesy appointment in the English Department, the place where I'd first earned tenure, and then left it, some years later, to embark on legal adventures. It's strange to be back because all returns are strange, as Rip Van Winkle and Leopold Bloom knew. It's wonderful to be back because my love of Joyce and Joyce scholarship has remained so strong. (Many of my publications in the past two decades have been about Joyce and modernism, even when they appeared in law journals.) It's also wonderful to be back because my friend and colleague Carol Kealiher continues to be the same energetic, steadying Managing Editor she was when I left the journal in 2000—how good it is to work with her again! And it's wonderful because I now collaborate, as Co-Editor, with Jeff Drouin of the English Department here. The JJQ has never had co-editors, but this well-rigged ship seems fit and ready to be steered by two skippers. I can already tell that Jeff and I—along with Carol, JJQ's outstanding advisory board, and our talented graduate-student assistants—will find ways to employ our "double vision" to discover and promote the best of new and traditional work on Joyce's life and writings. And then, to top it all, Sean Latham remains here at the university, and so Jeff and I have his sage counsel and good companionship on a regular basis. I look forward to resuming—and continuing—my collaboration with all of our friends and colleagues in Joyce. [End Page 571]