Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

by Brian Cogan

Graduate school used to be a place where one went to get an advanced degree, now it's a place where ardent Marxists, performance artists, Vikings, professors on the verge of a nervous breakdown and other miscreants go to drink. At least that's what it looks like to Brian Duvalier. Duvalier is a thin frustrated writer who is literally wasting away working for a magazine writing about foods that repulse him. When he travels to the (probably) mythic land of Brooklyn to go to graduate school, he finds not just a new group of friends, but also a world where the attitude of the faculty is "it works in practice, can we make it work in theory?" and where the prime pastime is debating arcane university rules with the venom that one usually reserves for discussions of the exploits of Pol Pot. But the semester is almost over and important questions need to be addressed. Can Duvalier get through graduate school without going completely mad? Will his inadvertent plagiarism be discovered? And who really replaced the statue of the school's founder with a Jell-O replica?

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2013

About the author

Brian Cogan, Ph.D., is a professor, author, media consultant, pop culture expert and musician. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, Long Island, NY. Professor Cogan received his Ph.D. from NYU in Media Ecology, and his specific areas of research interest are music (with a special emphasis on punk rock), comic books and graphic novels, and the intersection of politics and popular culture. Dr. Cogan also works as a consultant for branding companies. He has been interviewed by various media outlets, including NPR and Chicago Public Radio.