Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey

“As a young kid, I was the guy who knew stuff,” said Sheldon Goldfarb. “I was the walking encyclopedia. And I realize, that’s the job I have now.”

Goldfarb is the AMS’s archivist. It’s a wide-ranging job with lots of responsibilities, but simply put, Goldfarb is the one-stop shop for almost anything student union related. He can spout off the society’s bylaws, cite its constitution and tell you about the bowling alley that used to be in the SUB.

Goldfarb has taken a meandering path in life—going from aspiring novelist to radical journalist, from attempted revisionist in English Civil War history to expert on the author William Makepeace Thackeray.

But before his academic career took off, a 17-year-old Goldfarb was writing novels. His first was an allegory on the Vietnam War entitled Charlie’s War. It never took off, but he kept dabbling in writing. While getting a BA in history at McGill, he worked for four years at The McGill Daily, the student newspaper. He’s quick to point out that he did not agree with the Maoists that sat on the editorial board.

“We worked back in the day where you would sit in the office and write columns; we didn’t really interview people, because we knew all the answers, even without asking,” he said with a laugh.

After graduation and a few junior reporter jobs, Goldfarb went to England to try a Master’s in history. But he realized he was more of a moderate than he originally assumed. He was trying to do radical history, but realized that the evidence did not support his Marxist view of the English Civil War.

“In the end I gave it up and I stopped being a Marxist and I couldn’t continue that degree. I gave that up and came back to Canada.”

After another brief attempt as a novelist, Goldfarb went back to school, got an MA in English at the University of Manitoba and pursued a PhD in English, this time at UBC.

After a brief stint as a sessional lecturer in introductory English courses, he realized he didn’t want to stand in front of students who didn’t necessarily want to hear what he had to say. Finally, he enrolled in archival studies at UBC, taking a work-study position in the archives with the AMS in 1994, before being permanently hired as the student union’s official archivist in 1996.

But he wasn’t done with his dreams just yet. In 2005, Sheldon got his first novel published—Remember, Remember. It’s a book for young adults set in the Victorian era, and follows a 14-year-old protagonist who finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery. Goldfarb happily points out that the UBC library carries a copy.

“I’m doing now what seems like my destiny, you might say. This is who I am. I like answering questions and that’s what I get to do.”

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