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Personal. I was born in 1986 in rural northern Minnesota, a cold and strange land depicted rather well in Fargo. I moved states with my mother when I was 14, and attended a public school and state university in Iowa City, a special place I miss; to the right is an amusing picture from high school. As an undergrad, I acquired the name 'Kurt Ludwig Sylvan', lived in the basement of a bookshop, and worked in several bookshops, the Iowa Law Library, a Procter & Gamble factory, and the Iowa Law, Health Policy, and Disability Center. I moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2008 for graduate school at Rutgers. When I wasn’t working on philosophy, I went to New York City to take bad pictures, imagining at first that it was still the New York in which the Velvet Underground flourished, but gradually realizing that it was more like the New York of American Psycho (except with more money in the knowledge economy than in the 1980s). Since 2014 I’ve lived in Southampton, England.
My brilliant and wonderful partner Kate Sylvan is a dual UK/American citizen who was born in the UK (though we met and got married in America). On September 28th 2016, we were thrilled to bring home our first kid, Edward ('Teddy') Felix Sylvan. At present, his favorite things are stories, drawing, rocks, imagining himself performing everyday adult tasks ('I'm going to Sainsbury's to pick up blueberries for baby Bertie'), and asking 'Why?' in odd cases which end up making me sound anti-philosophical. On May 12th 2019, we had our second kid, Albert ('Bertie') Ernest Sylvan. He is almost 2. Lately he enjoys singing 'We Will Rock You', disco dancing, chasing after the cat, eating blueberries, admiring bins, and building deranged structures with blocks. He has also learned to be very polite, always saying 'No thanks!' to turn down suggestions (e.g., 'Do you want a bath?' 'No thanks!!!'). We also have a cat (Seneca) from the New Jersey street. We are trying our best not to relegate him to the margins of the household, though he has fallen to the bottom of this page. (Updated April 19th, 2021.)
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