Stewart Lawler

Part-Time Faculty Instructor
B. A., M.A., University of Michigan- English Literature

Ph.D., University of Kansas- American Studies (African American and Ethnic Studies)

I wasn’t a typical 60s drop out: I dropped out of the Ph.D. Program at the University of Michigan, where I had received my M.A. in English Literature. And in 2000, I completed a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Kansas in African American and Ethnic Studies. African-American culture calls that “going round for long” and it is a good thing. Rumi, the Sufi poet, echoes that when he says, “Don’t be fooled -/ the short-cut to the King’s house/ is a thousand miles out of the way.” Between times, I’ve been a bookseller, an inner-city neighborhood center director, an Ozark “farmer,” a clay artist, a bookseller, and a teacher. My dissertation and work is about Black expressive culture as a polyvocal, polyrhythmic polygenre performance for power, whether on the gridiron, basketball court, boxing ring, concert stage, Black rodeo, dancehall on Saturday night, church on Sunday, or even in a literary text. And its origins are West and Central African.

I love teaching and learning, and my classes are reflected in three guiding ideas. The German Renaissance mystic, Jakob Bohme, forewarns, “Gentle Reader, go no further, if you are not willing to change your life.” The culture critic, Gerald Graff, advises us, “When there is no consensus -   and there is not consensus – teach the conflicts.” And, finally, a Yoruba proverb informs us, “It is only the wisdom of the people that keeps the leader from being called a fool.”

I’m thrilled to be teaching in the Ethnic Studies Department, and I remind myself and my students “there is no strength without struggle” or as the old gospel song goes, “Lord, don’t take away my mountains.”

Stewart Lawler