Featured English Students

Tyler Reeb, Ph.D. in English

Canadian‐born Tyler Reeb began his graduate studies at Claremont Graduate University in Fall 2006 after a decade-long career as a journalist and editor who researched and wrote about topics that ranged from next-generation telecommunications and aerospace technologies to politics and urban planning to arts and culture. CGU’s focus on transdisciplinary studies and social innovation provided him with a supportive learning environment, which emboldened his resolve to conduct socially relevant scholarly inquiries that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

While pursuing doctoral studies at CGU, Tyler has drawn upon his experiences as a teacher, journalist, citizen, and father to conduct research and write essays that engage issues related to social justice. Toward that end, he won two research grants from CGU’s Transdisciplinary Studies department to explore the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Using that body of research, he led a student-faculty initiative to create a Spring 2008 CGU course entitled “The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Race Relations, Multiculturalism and Transnationalism.” In conjunction with that course, Tyler also organized a CGU-sponsored event on April 4, 2008―exactly 40 years after Dr. King’s assassination―that convened leading King scholars and an array of talented musicians and poets to imagine what Dr. King would say about the U.S. domestically and internationally if he were alive today. Working on that effort reinforced Tyler’s enthusiasm for his ultimate career objective: to work as a scholar who serves as a force for positive social change within and beyond the academy. With his commitments to education, research, social justice, and community service, Tyler was awarded the prestigious California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program fellowship in 2009.

Early in his doctoral studies, Tyler published his essay, “Playing Games and ‘Making’ A Novel: Mark Twain and Game Theory in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in The Mark Twain Annual. In that peer-reviewed work, Tyler used game, prospect, and decision theory to identify structures of violence in Twain’s celebrated text, while also laying bare the book’s underlying humanity.

Tyler’s dissertation, “A Philosophy of Narrative Synthesis: Uniting 21st Century Scholars Through Narrative,” earned him Claremont Graduate University’s 2011-2012 Transdisciplinary Dissertation Award. An excerpt from one of Tyler’s early dissertation chapters has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan book on Contemporary Political Theater. That chapter, “Narrating Peace and Healing in Transnational Theaters of War: From Ancient Greece to Afghanistan to DARPA,” ties together ancient Greek tragedy, modern political theater, the history of foreign military occupation in Afghanistan, and research that the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting on narrative studies.

Tyler actively promotes social justice and civic engagement via grassroots leadership. It was in that spirit that he co-founded the ReThinking Greater Long Beach conference series, which convenes concerned citizens, scholars, and journalists to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pressing concerns facing south Los Angeles County. Recently, CGU agreed to host the Long Beach Community Database (http://lbcdb.cgu.edu), an online resource developed as a community service by ReThinking Greater Long Beach to provide a publicly available common set of statistical information about Long Beach, California, for those interested in making Long Beach a better place for all residents to live and work.