Tod E. Jones
A Brief Autobiography

I am a native of San Diego, and although it hasn't been my home for most of my adult life, I am always happy to return to the most beautiful of U.S. cities. Since leaving San Diego, I have planted shallow roots in such places as Grand Canyon Village, Fairbanks, Colorado Springs, and a small town north of Little Rock called Searcy. I relocated to the east coast in 1993, upon being accepted into the doctoral program of the English Department at the University of Maryland. Before acquiring my "lion's skin" (the big diploma) in 1997, I had already begun planting my roots a little deeper into the D.C. metropolitan area.

In 1995 I met my wife, Karen Froslid-Jones, at a popular coffeeshop and bookstore in D.C., Politics and Prose. We were married three years later. We are both very much involved in the academic community. Karen is the Director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at American University; I am adjunct faculty at the University of Maryland. As a wedding gift, we adopted a three-year-old from what is now called OBG Cocker Spaniel Rescue. We named her Grendel, after a unique character in an Old English epic poem. Two years later, thinking that Grendel (to your right in the above photo—bottom row, of course) might enjoy some male companionship, we returned to the rescue center, where we picked up Augie (to your left in the photos). Our Grendel died in June 2010, and we have since returned to OBG for the adoption of a Sussex Spaniel, Mocha. Karen and I feel our lives greatly enriched by our canine children.

I have had two books published that deal with the history of ideas and persons important to the liberal Anglican tradition: The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement (Lexington Press, 2003) and The Cambridge Platonists: A Brief Introduction; with Eight Letters of Dr. Antony Tuckney and Dr. Benjamin Whichcote (University Press of America, 2005).

I am the founder and director of the Francis William Newman Research Center, a non-profit organization, for which I have recently completed a critical edition of The Works of Francis William Newman on Religion (The Philosophy Documentation Center, 2009). This edition, in ten volumes, provides readers with the texts of over 90 separate works, each in the final version approved by the author, together with notes on all textual variants from earlier published versions. Each volume is separately indexed. With the assistance of a fellowship from the Armstrong Browning Library, in 2008, I had the privilege of transcribing and annotating a substantial collection of Newman's letters—since published digitally by the PDC as Letters of Francis William Newman, Chiefly on Religion: The Braithwaite Correspondence, 1868–1897.

After teaching Homer in English translation for several semesters, I constructed a course on the Epic of Troy, incorporating texts by Quintus of Smyrna and the Greek dramatists. This is my favorite course to teach, and it also appears to be a favorite of my students. To further my appreciation and understanding of Homer, I am studying Homeric Greek in my spare time.

For a change of pace, I sometimes enjoy repairing damaged or deteriorating books in my library. I've created a link from the menu to your left to some before-and-after photos of books I've repaired.