Notable People

James Baldwin came to Bowling Green State University in 1978 as writer-in-residence and returned in 1979 as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Dr. Ernest Champion, professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, first invited Baldwin in 1977 to deliver a public lecture at the University and it was during a post-lecture conversation that Professor Champion suggested a more substantial visit. It was subsequently agreed that Baldwin would become writer-in-residence for a month in the spring of 1978. That Bowling Green State University was the first academic institution with which Baldwin affiliated himself was the consequence of many factors not least of which, as Baldwin later said, was that nobody had asked him before. However, it was also (and perhaps most importantly) a positive response to the energy and enthusiasm of the fledgling Ethnic Studies Department and its faculty.  

Needless to say, to have an artist of Baldwin’s stature at BGSU was of enormous significance to both the Ethnic Studies Department and the University as a whole. During his month as writer-in-residence in 1978 and his quarter as Distinguished Visiting Professor in 1979, the students and faculty of this mid-sized, mid-western state university were given the rare opportunity to engage in discussion and conversation with one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Yet for all the apparent distance between the author of Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time and his mostly white, rural middle-class students, Baldwin made clear that his teaching was reciprocally rewarding. From his very first class when one of his students asked him, "Why does the white man hate the n***er?" Baldwin found himself, in the classroom, confronting the philosophical implications of the racism he fought so eloquently to understand through his writing.  

And Baldwin was driven to understand the philosophical implications, and social and historical consequences, of racism. Baldwin was a supreme artist in whichever genre he chose to write, whether fiction, essay, drama, or poetry. Yet for all the diversity and enormity of his literary talent, as well as the Catholicism of his subject matter, to understand the ways in which the perversions of racism, oppression, and intolerance denied a wholeness to human relationships was the keystone of his writing. As Baldwin, reflecting on his classroom experience, said: “…the children, very soon, did not need me at all, except as a benign adult presence. They began talking to one another . . . They were talking of their desire to know one another . . . each was trying to enter into the experience of the other. The exchanges were sharp and remarkably candid, but never fogged by an unadmitted fear of hostility. They were trying to become whole." (Champion, 13)  

For a full account of James Baldwin at Bowling Green State University, see: Ernest Champion, Mr. Baldwin, I Presume: James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe -- A Meeting of the Minds, Lanham: University Press of America, 1995.

Dr. Ray B. Browne is internationally recognized as an expert in popular culture, and is often credited with coining the term and as being among the first to propose its serious study.  

In 1967, Browne moved to Bowling Green with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. At BGSU, he created the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and published the Journal of Popular Culture, the nation’s first publication of its kind, which includes writings of popular culturists, folklorists and American studies enthusiasts. 

He also founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) and organized the Bowling Green Popular Press in 1970, and in 1978, founded the Journal of American Culture. He later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture. 

In 1973, he established BGSU’s popular culture department in 1973 with colleagues Michael Marsden and Jack Nachbar, and in 1977, he received the title of Distinguished University Professor.  

After his retirement from full-time teaching, in 1992, Browne continued to contribute to the BGSU’s popular culture book collection through his writing and donations. BGSU’s now 40-year-old popular culture library is named in honor of Browne and his second wife, Pat. They were co-editors of the 1,010-page “Guide to United States Popular Culture,” published by the Bowling Green Popular Press in 2001. His legacy also lives on in The Ray Browne Association (the SCCS Graduate Student Organization) and their annual Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies. 

“Popular culture is the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the seedbed in which democracy grows.  It is the everyday world around us; the mass media, entertainments and diversions.  It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology and religion—our total life picture.  It is the way of living we inherit, practice, and modify as we please, and how we do it.  It is the dreams we dream while asleep.” - Ray Browne