Benjamin Young joins the Department of Rhetoric after completing his B.A. in Literature at Bard College in 2000; his senior project, “Art and Life in the Avant-Garde and After: Toward an Aesthetics and Politics of Critical Cultural Production,“ attempts to theorize a critical aesthetic practice committed to the politics of “everyday life.“ After graduation, Young spent a year in the Whitney Museum’s prestigious Independent Study Program, where he studied contemporary art and critical theory. Young’s scholarly inquiries center around contemporary aesthetics. He proposes to study what he calls art and the ethico-political—or public art/art in public—in order to think about the changing public role of art and the changing culture of democratic politics, a project which lies at the intersection of aesthetics and political and cultural theory. His mentor will be former Townsend Dissertation Fellow Elizabeth Chang, of the Department of English.