His dream job may be to open a gelato store in Sienna, but UBC English professor Ira Nadel has a lot on his plate here in Vancouver.

Nadel has been teaching at UBC for what he calls “a terribly long time.” He completed his graduate work at Cornell University and made the decision to work on the West Coast after visiting the area while working for an airline.

“When it became time to look at universities I thought the Northwest would be interesting,” said Nadel, “and what was most influential was an article in The New York Times about the architecture of Vancouver.”

This statement speaks to Nadel’s fascination with architectural spaces. He co-writes books with Donald MacDonald, an architect from San Francisco, the most recent being about the city’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“The art. The aesthetics. Why it’s a beautiful object. It’s a little bit of history but it’s more about what are the properties that make the bridge an icon,” he said.

Nadel’s interest in architectural spaces comes out in his courses at UBC. However, Nadel was more interested in talking about his interest in biographies, mentioning one he wrote on musician Leonard Cohen. “He’s an amazing individual,” he said. “I really got to understand how he writes his music, how he records. I spent time with him in a recording studio….He went through this very lengthy period of Zen buddhism and I spent time with him up in the Mount Baldy Zen Centre.”

As well, Nadel is the academic director of communications for the Faculty of Arts. He is in charge of coordinating a series of initiatives which include managing the faculty website, the Arts Wednesdays lectures at UBC Robson Square and a column featured in The Vancouver Sun. The column draws on “the expertise of various faculty members…to talk about vampires, to talk about the book, to talk about the stage of Canadian literature…a whole variety of topics.” He added that the column is based on contemporary issues and experiences.

Nadel will be lecturing in China in the spring. He feels that intellectual exchange is part of what academia is about. “I don’t mean that abstractly, I mean traveling, going to conferences, meeting students.”

“This is what certainly enhances one’s own teaching, one’s own study, really, in terms of materials.”

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