J. Michael Straczynski doesn’t much care for rules. As a student at San Diego State University, he risked expulsion by bluffing his way into two writing courses taught by celebrated writer and educator Norman Corwin. Straczynski didn’t get expelled, and Corwin became a lifelong friend and cherished mentor. But he understood the risks, and therein lies an important lesson. “In order to be any kind of creative person, you have to be willing to push outward and engage with the world in ways that sometimes break the system,” Straczynski told students and faculty during his 2024 Patricia Eliet Memorial Lecture at the LSU ballroom on April 11. “When you do that, strange and wonderful things ... Read More
Writing
New Book Challenges Antisemitism in Academia
In discussions of race, racism, and identity, Jewishness is a contested category. Particularly in the U.S., Jewish people are often considered white; they are framed as a religious group, rather than an ethnic one. However, this categorization can make antisemitism–and Jewish people themselves–invisible in both academic and popular discourses. Associate Professor of English Mara Lee Grayson's new book, Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric (Peter Lang, 2023), explores that erasure and its impact on Jewish scholars. As a Jewish woman, Grayson says the ideas within the book had been “percolating” within her for years, ... Read More
