LITERATURE

Hoping to make sense of his experience, Kaiser says he made a “productive and life-transforming connection” in the second half of his sophomore year to pursue academia in order to provide a theory behind both that violence and his attempts to stop it.

Kaiser says this love developed when he declared his major in English, the discipline in which he found answers in Victorian literature.

“Victorian literature is concerned with suffering and violence of social interest,” Kaiser says. “It provided a terrific laboratory in which to theorize the nature of violence.”

After graduation, Kaiser matriculated at Rutgers University, where he pursued a doctorate in English.

“He was always a brilliant graduate student,” says Rutgers Professor of English Carolyn Williams, who was on Kaiser’s dissertation committee.

Williams in particular praised the originality of Kaiser’s work on the “ludicrous,” which sought to discover what was funny, playful, absurd, or irrational in the highly serious Victorian period.

While at Rutgers, Kaiser taught three classes that served both as early versions of English 154 and as part of the expansion of the Rutgers’ Women’s Studies Department into gender studies. He says he hoped the course would make gender studies “palatable” to undergraduates.

Many students, according to Williams, say that Kaiser’s class on “Theory of Gender and Sexuality” at Rutgers was the best they took during their time there.

“I would recommend this course to anyone and everyone. I think it should be required,” one student wrote in his evaluation.

“The world is a different place to me now,” wrote another.

His class, which also included middle-aged students, taught Kaiser to treat his students like adults—a strategy he later brought to English 154.

THE ‘AND’

Most of the texts that Kaiser incorporates in Literature and Sexuality seem “vulgar for the sake of being vulgar,” he says.

“But beneath what seems crude is actually quite philosophically profound,” he added.