“My decision to become a teacher and a scholar was founded on the firm belief in the redemptive value of education...the conviction that for education to have redemptive value, it needs to be critical and socially engaged as well as to foster community.”

Graduate school. A place of high competition and higher stakes, where students contend for tenure spots and fellowships, everyone for themselves. And it is there that Cesare Casarino requires his students to write assignments together, a tactic requiring practice of the philosophical questions his “intellectually exhilarating” seminars raise.

Casarino, a renowned scholar in his own right, makes it a priority to mentor his students. With the goal of professionalization, he conducts mock interviews, critiques job talks, and otherwise prepares students to be employed and published.

But he never seeks to mold students into models of himself. Instead, in the words of one student, he sees his duty as “encouraging advisees to better understand the scope and direction of their own will to knowledge.”

Despite scholarship that sends him traveling him around the world, Casarino takes it upon himself to be ever available to students, arranging times to call and carefully review thousands of pages of book chapters, theses, and dissertations. “His time is in great demand, but this never diminishes the quality of his attention.” Another student notes that he is “the rare professor that will attend graduate student panels at national conferences.”

“He taught me that true intellectual inquiry is based on ethical and collective engagement with others and not in isolated and competitive work. His is rare, indeed; I am fortunate to call him my teacher, adviser, and friend.”

Visit the Cesare Casarino faculty Web page here.