Title: "To be an intellectual, you only need to start with one thing: curiosity.” 
  
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Return of the Soldier, the newest play by University Honors Program Director Kelly Younger, is being developed both here in Los Angeles and New York. In the classroom, Younger encourages his students to foster strong intellectual interests and curiosities.  “I tell students to identify what interests them, pursue it, and never let it go."

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University Honors Program Director Kelly Younger, Ph.D., is a dynamic English professor well-suited for drama.  “I have a natural proclivity toward exaggeration, crisis, commotion, spectacle, song, performance, storytelling, comedy, tragedy, and flat out lies.  It was either: become a playwright or a lawyer.”

Return of the Soldier, his newest play, is under development with the Ensemble Studio theatre/LA Playwrights Unit in Hollywood, the Rebecca West Society in New York, and LMU’s Theatre Department under the direction of Ron Marasco, Ph.D.  “It’s inspired by the 1918 novella by Rebecca West.  This loose adaptation is re-set near a marine base after the invasion of Baghdad.  It's about a shell-shocked marine, who returns home from Iraq, having suffered an amnesic loss of the last fifteen years.  He remembers his first love, but not his own wife.”

The English connoisseur credits Beckett, Dickens, and Chekhov for inspiring his career choice.  “I read Waiting for Godot for the first time the year Beckett died.  The universe opened,” says Younger.  “And every college student should re-read Great Expectations, especially during these years when they are forming or reforming their identities.”
 
While teaching classes like Playwriting, Introduction to Drama, Classical Literature in Translation, and the Honors Great Books class On the Sublime, Younger tries to lead by example.  “I always attempt to share my research with students because I believe it’s beneficial for them to see someone who is genuinely curious about something…I try to include them in my work by assigning a text I am working on for the first time as well.  We can then discover it together.”

Professor Younger also encourages students to develop strong intellectual interests and curiosities.  “I tell students to identify what interests them, pursue it, and never let it go.  Hopefully, I can show them that being an intellectual doesn't mean being snooty, erudite, or elitist . . . To be an intellectual, you only need to start with one thing: curiosity.”