|  A.J. Caschetta, a Shillman/Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer in English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, brings a singular outlook to his critiques of Middle East studies. As he explained in an interview with CW, the aftermath of 9/11 compelled him to address the Islamist dangers threatening the West.
Caschetta enjoyed teaching English literature, but after 9/11 “it felt like a silly luxury and seemed unimportant.” Several months too old to join the U.S. Air Marshals, he considered returning to grad school for a degree in Middle East studies. But “the state of the field kept me from pursuing that option,” he says, so “instead, I resolved to devote as much time as possible to reading and learning about Islam, Militant Islam, the Middle East, terrorism, and counter-terrorism.” His background helped. “For my Ph.D., I studied the effects of the French Revolution on English society, and the Revolution’s decay into the Reign of Terror,” he explained. This familiarity with the history of terrorism and its influence on culture provided the insights he needed to introduce a class on the history and rhetoric of terrorism that both the English and political science departments supported—the latter “so much so that my class was given its own number, making it one of the few classes students can take for either political science or English credit.” Caschetta says this has “enabled me to stay in academia in what feels like a relevant way.” His students at RIT are “logical, career-oriented, empirical thinkers,” although he’s “not very optimistic about higher education’s ‘activism’ directed toward the state of Israel.” Still, former students now in graduate school, the military, and law enforcement appreciate his influence on their lives. “Nothing beats having former students tell me that what they learned in my class has helped them in some way,” he says. We think Caschetta’s readers would express the same sentiment. | 
