Timothy Buell

So far . . .

I was born in Toronto, Canada, although I grew up living in Cambodia, Hong Kong, Sarawak (Borneo), Singapore, and Thailand, because of my father’s work for the Colombo Plan.

My university education began with a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto, followed by a Master's in Composition. After further studies in digital sound synthesis at the MIT Media Lab, I attended the University of Pittsburgh on a Mellon doctoral fellowship, graduating with a Ph.D. in Music Theory and Composition.

One of the most important discoveries I made as a grad student at Pitt was that you were not necessarily confined to taking only courses within your department: You could (with some obvious and perhaps sensible exceptions, like vascular surgery) take almost any graduate course you wished, provided you could convince both your supervisor and the course instructor that you had a reasonable expectation of passing. When I saw a graduate course on William Blake in the English Department, my own department’s offerings began to lose their allure, and I headed across campus to boldly go (according to my demurring supervisor) where no Ph.D. music student had gone before. It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable courses I ever took as a graduate student, and I later discovered that my apparent dilettantism was actually quite academically respectable when called interdisciplinary studies.

My first academic job was as an assistant professor in music theory and composition. After a few months, cold reality set in as I realized that — in contrast to my interdisciplinary freedom as a dilettante graduate student — as a junior faculty member the opposite was true with respect to teaching and research expectations. I became restless, and when offered a post-doc position as Scholar-in-Residence for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Calgary, by the following spring I was — as Gordon Lightfoot sang — Alberta Bound.

Since the Scholar-in-Residence appointment was within the University of Calgary's Faculty of Communication and Culture, I was given the opportunity to teach some courses there, which led to a teaching appointment once the Post-Doc was over. While at the U of C, I also held adjunct professorships and secondments in the Faculties of Education, Continuing Education, Environmental Design, Music, the Graduate Department of Educational Psychology, and the Graduate Program in Communications Studies. I received t