Binghamton University

Steven Wayne Koren is an American screenwriter. He was one of the writers for the movies Bruce Almighty, Click, Superstar, and A Night at the... Roxbury, and wrote for Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld. Koren grew up in Queens, New York with two older sisters and attended Cardozo High School in Bayside Queens. He performed in many high school plays and musicals including Tony in West Side Story, and the following year the Elvis character in the play Bye Bye Birdie. He went to college at the Binghamton University. After college, he began his career as an NBC page. Among his duties as a page was working for Saturday Night Live. He eventually became a writer for the series. Later, he became a writer for Seinfeld. In the Seinfeld episode "The Van Buren Boys", one of the characters is named Steve Koren. He also wrote the famous "Serenity Now" episode.
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Andrew Bergman is an American screenwriter, film director, and novelist. New York magazine in 1985 dubbed him "The Unknown King of Comedy". He... graduated from Binghamton University and earned a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation, a study of Depression-era Hollywood films, was published in 1971 by NYU Press under the title We're In the Money: Depression America and Its Films. He wrote James Cagney: The Pictorial Treasury of Film Stars. He wrote the original screenplay that served as the basis for Mel Brooks's classic Blazing Saddles, and was among the co-writers who adapted it into its final state. Since then, he has written or co-written the cult classics The In-Laws, Fletch, and Soapdish; written and directed The Freshman, Honeymoon in Vegas and It Could Happen To You; written and produced Striptease with Demi Moore; and directed the Jacqueline Susann biopic Isn't She Great. Bergman has written four novels: The Big Kiss-Off of 1944, Hollywood and LeVine, Tender Is LeVine, and Sleepless Nights. He also wrote the Broadway comedy, Social Security, and Working Title.
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Paul Reiser is an American comedian, actor, television personality, author, screenwriter and musician. He is most widely known for his role on the... long-running television sitcom Mad About You. Reiser was born in New York City, the son of Helen, a homemaker, and Sam Reiser, a wholesale health food distributor. Reiser attended the East Side Hebrew Institute on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He earned his bachelor's degree at Binghamton University, where he majored in music . He was active in campus theater productions and founded "The Little Theater That Could", an on-campus community theater organization located in Hinman College, Reiser's dorm community. It was later renamed Hinman Production Company. Reiser eventually found his calling when he performed in New York City comedy clubs during university summer breaks. After honing his skills as a stand-up comic in New York City, he had a breakout film role in 1982 when he appeared in Diner, a coming-of-age film by Barry Levinson.
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Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. His work as... co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been highly influential, and he spent a decade as contributing editor of The New Yorker starting in 1992, where he also made a number of high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to Françoise Mouly. Spiegelman's work first gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s. His work in this period was short and formally experimental, and often included autobiographical elements. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977. After Breakdowns, Spiegelman wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He settled on the theme of his father's experiences during as a Holocaust survivor. The book, Maus, would take thirteen years to complete. It drew both praise and criticism for depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The book won a number of prizes, most prominently a special Pulitzer Prize.
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Herbert P. Bix is the author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, an acclaimed account of the Japanese Emperor and the events which shaped... modern Japanese imperialism. Bix earned his Ph.D. in history and Far Eastern languages from Harvard University and a B.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. For several decades, he has written about modern and contemporary Japanese history in the United States and Japan. He has taught at many universities and is a professor of history and sociology at Binghamton University. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.
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