To be read and remembered - Part I

By Sophia Oppedisano

Editor-in-Chief

All of us have walked into a professor's office for the first time. Whether it's for office hours, advising, or just to say hello, stepping over the threshold feels like stepping into a capsule of a faculty member’s celebrated and decorated career. 

Diplomas, thank-you cards, stacks of research, calendars that may or may not be flipped to the correct month - all of these are staples in the offices of professors. However, there is one crucial element that never fails to fascinate - a professor’s bookshelves.

Indicative of everything from a professor’s academic specialty to their family lives to their passions and personalities, their bookshelves often contain clues to precisely what makes professors at Framingham State so extraordinary.

You just have to be willing to ask. 

President Nancy Niemi, a self-proclaimed “voracious” reader, has bookshelves spanning the length of her office with extra shelf space in an adjoining meeting room.

Niemi’s shelves exude an elegance and a strong, scholarly presence in the sunlight that streams through the windows facing out toward campus. Her books sit perched on wooden shelves built directly into the wall, each a vital part of Niemi’s journey from student to university president.

To describe her shelves in one word, Niemi stepped back to admire her many books, journals, and papers and said decisively, “provocative.”

For Niemi, her books often fall into one of two categories: professional or personal. While the shelves in her office contain about 90% of the books she considers professional, a book can make the shelf if it was “a profound book for me, if it changed the way I think. Another would be if it's part of my work or part of my research,” she said.

A shelf of well-worn books on gender and education - Niemi’s area of specialty in her research - sits next to her office door. As she perused her stacks, Niemi said she could give a “whirlwind tour” of how each book influenced her studies and her life.

In graduate school, Niemi researched how gender affects middle school students, specifically, “What the intersection was of being female and being in middle school in terms of intelligence, the perception of intelligence, and school success,” she said. 

As she pulled books off the shelf with yellowed pages and wrinkled sticky notes protruding between the pages from her days as a graduate student, Niemi confessed she wanted to title her research “Being Smart Doesn’t Make You a Man.”

Niemi said, “This publisher didn't let me do it, and even my grad advisor didn't let me do it, but it's my secret subtitle, because what I found, quite simply, is you could be considered an attractive, popular girl, or you could be considered smart - not both.” 

Every book or article Niemi has written or co-written sits on a shelf at the far end of her office. “I'm very proud of this little part over here. … I still can’t believe I ever wrote a book. It just makes me proud, and I understand just how hard it is,” she said.

As she looked over the titles of her own work, Niemi said one of the nicest things anyone ever said to her was when her dad told her, “I was proud of you for writing a book, but you wrote a real book.”

Since Niemi has risen through the ranks of academia from student to university president, she said she deeply enjoys being surrounded by “the knowledge” her books have imparted on her since she was an undergraduate herself. 

While Niemi said she enjoys a good fiction story, such as “March” by Geraldine Brooks, she often gravitates toward “well-written stories of perseverance.”

She recommends “The Indifferent Stars Above” by Daniel James Brown and “The Wager” by David Grann. 

While Niemi insists she doesn’t have an office big enough to house all her favorite books, those she does have are comparable to “having old friends.” 

Across the quad from Niemi’s office in Dwight Hall, English Professor Kristen Abbott Bennett’s cozy office in May Hall faces out toward State Street. Bennett has two towering bookshelves packed to the brim with thick volumes, knick-knacks, and mementos. 

Bennett, a professor of ancient, medieval, and early modern literature as well as digital humanities, said as far as her reading habits are concerned, “I'm a 1590s kind of girl.”

She leaned back in her chair to admire titles by the likes of Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, as well as beloved gifts from students, and decided if she had to describe her shelves in one word, she would choose “love.”

The first shelf contains mostly overflow from home, but even those books are organized according to each time period Bennett has studied or now teaches. Among the titles are a Harry Potter action figure, an eclectic cat lamp, old props from Shakespeare plays, and a BINGO game.

Situated diagonally across her office is Bennett’s second bookshelf, which she described as more organized because of the gorgeous volumes it contains. This is where “all the action is,” she added.

A year's worth of the “Renaissance Quarterly” journal, a complete, illustrated Shakespeare, which Bennett received for her Ph.D completion, and an extensive collection of Shakespeare variants adorn the upper few shelves. 

Though her ancient, medieval, and early modern niche might intimidate students, Bennett said she enjoys reading fantasy fiction, including titles such as “Babel” by R.F. Kuang, the “Harry Potter” series, and the “All Souls” series by Deborah Harkness.

Titles like “Babel” were recommended to Bennett by her students, and she enjoys getting recommendations of their favorite titles, she said. 

Along with their recommendations, Bennett’s shelves contain gifts from students. “I love my stuff - everything on the shelf has a story,” she said.

A homemade witch's tea, Shakespeare tea, a precious kitty soap, and numerous thank-you notes were all gifted to her by students. 

On the bottom shelf, an ornate Harry Potter lunch box sits perched between stacks of books. “That's from my mom. She died in 2002, but she didn't really get all my reading. I don't know if she would have loved that I'm an English professor. It's probably telling that I didn't embark on this path until after she was gone, but she tried, and so the Harry Potter lunch box is quite dear to me, and I like to look at it,” she said.

The rest is a “hodge podge” of books she loans to students, old DVDs, her Ph.D notes, anthologies, books by transcendentalist writers, and one lonely cookbook she bought at the May Hall book sale with honorable intentions but it never made it home with her.

Her prized possession on the shelf is “the most expensive photograph I’ve ever taken,” she said. The framed photo is of the only copy of Christopher Marlowe’s play, “Doctor Faustus,” which is housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. “I went all the way there to go visit it,” she said.

Some material on the shelf gets rotated in or out depending on what research projects Bennett said she is working on at home. Regardless of what the books on her shelves are used for, they span both centuries and interests.

“In the framework where my mind exists, which is in a very nonlinear space - it's all connected. … The past is prologue. … I really feel it to the core of my being that I've always felt since I was very young,” she said.

Bennett said she has always had an “intuitive” connection to history, beginning with her love of the transcendentalist writers. “I've always felt like there's something there that provides a weird sense of comfort when I can't make sense of this world. I also feel like it helps us be more enthusiastic about the future, whatever it's going to be, and the unknown. I'm not fearless, but it makes me, as Mary Moody Emerson said, ‘Always do what you're afraid to do,’” she added.

These are just two stories of two bookshelves out of hundreds across campus. The stories we all have to tell are important and illuminating and something like a bookshelf, knick-knacks, laptop stickers, or clothing can represent the bridges that unite us. 

Ask your peers, your professors, and other members of our community about their stories - you never know what you’ll learn.