My e-mail address is

theo at mun dot ca

Potential graduate students: I'm not currently in a position to fund more graduate students and my faculty does not allow unfunded international students. However, I still encourage you to apply to MUN, as there are other professors who will be looking for students. If you are a Canadian citizen or permanent resident and are interested in doing graduate studies part-time, see my research page.

How to make sure I don't read your e-mail: We all know reading e-mail can take a lot of time. To help me save time, you can send me e-mail in a way that will almost certainly ensure that I won't read it.

• E-mail me from an unknown address. If you are e-mailing from an @mun.ca address or some address that is in my address book, I'll probably read it. So please do me a favour: e-mail me from some address you've never e-mailed me from before.

• Don't put any keywords in your subject line.

  computer
  software
  programming
  engineering
  fencing

  So do me a favour: don't include these keywords in your subject line. Otherwise, I will almost certainly read your message.

• Avoid meaningful subject lines. Of course some people can't help e-mailing from an account that I know. Don't worry. There is still hope. Avoid meaningful subject lines. Messages that have subject lines like "Read this" or "Please distribute" or "Upcoming conference" or "Call for proposals" or "My name is Olga and I am looking for friends". (Actually that last one is an example of a meaningful subject line, but I still won't read the message.)

• Put the meaningful part of your message in an attachment. Why should the main body of your message tell me what the attachment is about? That would only encourage me to open the attachment, which is a rather time consuming process. In my experience, e-mail that contains only a long chain of forwarded messages, each saying "please distribute", generally have attachments that encourage me to apply for funding for bowel disease research or to attend economics conferences. (Now bowel disease is really nasty and research grants are really nice, so I wish I had a proposal at the ready, but I don't; and goodness knows where we'd be without economics conferences, however I am not likely to have my papers accepted at one.)