Mid-life crises led me to dancing. As an overweight out of shape academic with a failing marriage, part of marriage therapy was to do something new and different for both of us. Our daughter, Jenny, was taking a dance class and at a recital event for her, her teacher announced a beginning adult jazz dance class. We signed up for the class thinking it would be a shared new, if likely awkward and humbling, experience. I loved it, my spouse did not. I became newly aware of being a moving body and, despite the soreness and awkwardness, I absolutely loved it.

The longer story is told elsewhere, but it changed my life and few days over the last thirty-five years have not had an occasion to dance. I changed my academic focus to dancing and taught world dance for many years to ninety students including weekly dance studios taught by dancers from cultures around the world. I traveled widely to learn dancing. I founded and operated a world dance and music studio with my daughter who has a degree in ethnomusicology.

When I founded the studio I never imagined myself teaching dancing. I principally wanted to attract artists from the world over, sponsor cultural exchange visas for them, and have them teach in my studio. However, again strange circumstances led me to teach a beginning salsa dance class when I had a dance teacher suddenly quit. I loved it even more than teaching academic topics at the university. I became obsessed with developing teaching techniques. For over a decade I regularly taught dance to high school students, choreographed for my own salsa dance performance group, and taught many Latin American classes a week to thousands of local adult dancers.

Constantly dancing not only changed my body, it also remade the way I think and the way i approach my academic work. While in 2012 I published a book on dancing, my comprehension and appreciation of dancing and moving has continued to develop and mature uninterrupted with some recent results appearing as a moving-based theory of religion in The Proper Study of Religion (Oxford, 2020) and an appreciation of being human in On Moving: A Biological and Philosophical Account of Human Distinctiveness (2022).

A variety of materials are accumulated in the site pages here related to dancing and moving.