Michigan State University graduate Josh Kilmer-Purcell is a New York Times bestselling author who, together with husband, Dr. Brent Ridge, founded a multimillion-dollar skin care company, starred in their own reality TV show, and won season 21 of The Amazing Race — and those are just a few of the couple’s many accomplishments in what can be described as an…
Afrofuturism has entered more mainstream conversations in the last decade thanks to its influence on fashion and art, notably in the music of Janelle Monae and in the film “Black Panther.” However, the idea of Afrofuturism, which often combines science fiction, technology, and a Black understanding of liberty, expands beyond pop culture into practice and social action. To help answer…
A gift of $500,000 that’s rooted in reparations and recognizes the powerful contributions being made by Michigan State University’s Department of African American and African Studies (AAAS) toward racial and social justice will benefit the students and faculty of that department for generations to come. The Adrian Dominican Sisters, a Catholic congregation of more than 400 Dominican sisters and 200…
Elias Young, a junior Japanese major at Michigan State University, is applying his language skills and interest in LGBTQ+ culture on an undergraduate research project where he plans to create an open-access database outlying how queer spaces, events, and culture intersect with mainstream Japanese culture. This summer, he will travel to Japan, with support from an Undergraduate Research Initiative grant…
While balancing being a freelance fashion stylist, fashion designer, creative director, and social media influencer, Michigan State University student Takai Taggart also manages the demands of MSU’s newest magazine. As of fall 2022, the Apparel and Textile Design major launched N Crowd, a fashion magazine created by and for Black students. “My main focus when creating N Crowd was to offer a safe space for Black creatives who attend Michigan State University,” said Taggart, who was…
Class assignments provide opportunities to learn, practice, and demonstrate acquired knowledge, and sometimes they do more than that by planting seeds of creative and entrepreneurial inspiration for developing new products or services. It was a class assignment, combined with her own personal experiences as a disabled person, that gave Professional and Public Writing major Charlotte Bachelor the inspiration she needed…
Ruby Mendoza, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, has won a national award in recognition of their outstanding work in the area of queer theory. Mendoza is one of only two recipients of the 2023 Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, a national scholarship presented by the Conference on College Composition and…
Michigan State University’s Department of Religious Studies will expand its curriculum to include a focus on Anishinaabe communities, and more broadly, Great Lakes Native American cultures thanks to the creation of two new faculty positions conceived by the Department’s winning proposal for an inaugural 1855 Professorship. Named for the year MSU was founded, the 1855 Professorships, created by the Office…
Linguistics major Ryan Peters has devoted much of his time to cultivating the LGBTQIA2S+ community at Michigan State University in his pivotal role as the Residence Halls Association (RHA) Representative for People Respecting the Individuality of Students at MSU (PRISM), which is the South Neighborhood LGBTQIA2S+ Caucus. He was first elected as the RHA Representative for PRISM during his first semester on campus.…
An equity-based art exhibition featuring more than 200 pieces of work from all around the world, exploring the use of creativity to cope with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, is opening this week at various Lansing, Michigan, locations and was three years in the making by a team led by Nancy DeJoy, Associate Professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Writing,…