David Weir is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he taught literature, linguistics, and cinema. He has published books on Jean Vigo, James Joyce, William Blake, orientalism, and anarchism, as well as three books on decadence. Those books have had a major role in the development of decadence as an academic field of study, beginning with Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), Decadent Culture in the United States (2009), and, most recently, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (2018). Together with his transatlantic colleague Jane Desmarais of Goldsmiths, University of London, he has edited the Cambridge Critical Concepts volume Decadence and Literature (forthcoming, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Decadence (forthcoming, 2021). His own contributions to both the Cambridge and Oxford collections concern the relationship of cinema to the culture of decadence. His current project is a book on Ernst Lubitch’s Trouble in Paradise for BFI’s Film Classics series. He now lives in a Hudson Valley village in upstate New York, where he spends his time writing, fly fishing, and drinking wine.

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Biography has always been a challenge for David Weir, of whom it is often said that the unlived life is not worth examining. According to maternal reports, he started life out as a child—an infant, rather, who wept to be born, an existential assessment yet to be revisited or revised. That same mother lies behind another early memory—of wishing that she would not come up to his room to kiss him every damn night. Possibly, these experiences lay behind young Weir’s impulse to run away from the circus to join an orphanage, an impulse impeded mainly by the fact that there was no circus away from which to run. The irony has become even more compelling since, now that he is, in fact, an orphan, however superannuated, whose aversion to the circus is matched only by the aversion of the circus to him. Despite some early successes in the mathematical-athletic arena (he won silver in the Eleatic half-meter marathon), he later adopted decadence as his preferred mode of neurosis. Weir no longer goes out in public, which is a relief—not least to the public, having steadfastly refused to make itself artistic after all these years.