Junior Ryan Casey is studying questions of morality and authorship in journalism and literature. “I’m interested in why we read and teach novels, what messages we are supposed to get from them and how they can—or how they fail to—reflect the world around us,” he says.
When not in class, Casey is pursuing a career as a professional tap dancer. He is a member of the New York-based company Dorrance Dance, founded by Gallatin alumna Michelle Dorrance (BA ’01), and he has appeared on the television show So You Think You Can Dance.
Casey fused his passions for writing and dance through an independent study project in which he read books about choreography and others filled with poetry inspired by New York. He then wrote his own poetry, which he combined with tap and other dance styles, presenting his performance in the Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts. “Writing and dance have so much in common,” Casey says, “their rhythms, their vocabularies, their themes. They both aim to communicate ideas and entertain their audiences in different ways.”
Casey has served as an editor for the Gallatin Review, the Literacy Review and the Gallatin Research Journal. “I’m always interested in what my peers are writing and thinking about,” he says, “and it’s great that Gallatin publishes such a diversity of voices and topics.”
