Lesley sterns biography children

Farewell to our beloved colleague, mentor and friend, Lesley Stern, who passed away on January 29, , after living for many years with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, an experience chronicled in "Diary of a Detour" Duke We join her partner, the political theorist Jeffrey Minson San Diego , her brother Duncan Addison England , and a host of friends and readers around the world in love and appreciation.

Lesley was born and raised in colonial Rhodesia, where the political turmoil and authoritarian education system informed her resolute spirit and her later activism.

Stern was a pivotal figure in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic discipline in the Australian academy before shifting the base of her career, at the turn of the century, to Southern California, where she came to hold a unique place in ficto-criticism, a form of writing to which she brought a uniquely vibrant aesthetic sensibility and wry wit.

Stern was born and raised on a farm in British colonial Rhodesia now Zimbabwe during the s. She was awarded an Honours degree in English language and literature from the University of Rhodesia in Salisbury now Harare. She left Rhodesia to pursue a Ph. This interest in film drew her to London, where she worked as a researcher at the British Film Institute, for which she was briefly a manager of regional film theaters.

In , before completion of her Ph. After a period of involvement in Australia's independent film scene and the left journal Intervention, Stern left the academy for two years to work in Japan, where she wrote scripts and worked in film and video production.

Lesley Stern () was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and wrote across, and through, a mélange of genres, including fiction, memoir, history, and criticism.

She began to look for inspiration to the novel and ethnographic and literary nonfiction, prose forms that had been part of her earliest formation as a writer. During this period, she helped to set up the Independent Filmmakers Association, participated in a feminist writing group, and served on the board of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies.

During her California period, Stern continued to write about film in distinctive prose form while increasingly extending her attention to other topics and projects. TaLL mentored newly arrived Syrian refugees. Lesley expanded the program to include classes in Syrian cooking. With artist Ruth Wallen she became active in the San Diego Shambhala Center, where she practiced meditation and studied ikebana.

In essays and books about smoking, gardens, backyard chickens, and the science and art of living with chronic illness, Stern honed a ficto-critical style in dialog with a circle of renowned authors including the film, art and fiction writer Leslie Dick, the sensory ethnographer Kathleen Stewart, the poet, novelist, and journalist Eileen Myles, the technoscience studies writer Donna Haraway, and the critical theorist Lauren Berlant.

To write "Diary of a Detour," she put aside work on "Gardening in a Strange Land," a book project for which plans are underway for posthumous publication.