Listen.
I want to share
some memories of my mentor and dissertation director Professor Lisi Oliver, who
was killed while cycling in East Feliciana Parish on Sunday.
I remember walking to Lisi’s office some years ago. It was mid-September. The weather was still
stifling. I was coming to talk to her about my dissertation, which was stifling
me in a much different way. I walked slowly. Just thinking about my writing
made my stomach clench and breathing more difficult.
Lisi was sitting at
her desk with a stack of homework assignments next to her. She held one of
these in her hands. Surfin’ USA was rolling
across the office from the small radio that she had placed in her window.
I watched Lisi
enjoying the song for a moment before she noticed I was there. She tapped the
floor with one foot and bobbed her head along to the beat while she scanned the
homework with her eyes.
A smile split
across my face. And just like that, the knots in my stomach untied themselves, my
breathing steadied, and I was no longer so worried about talking about my
dissertation.
Lisi had that effect on whomever she met. People would come alive just by being near her.
Lisi had told me on
numerous occasions leading up to my preliminary exam on Old and Middle English how
much she loved The Seafarer, a poem
that gives many people fits to translate. She would get this look whenever she
mentioned it. Her eyes would grow bigger and brighter, as though she could hear
the sea faintly but irresistibly calling to her.
I studied The Seafarer until it wasn’t a question
of whether or not I could translate any given passage but rather how I would choose
to parse specific phrases on the spur of the moment.
Lisi put The Dream of the Rood on the exam. We
laughed and laughed when I told her how certain I was that it would be The Seafarer and how much time I had spent
studying it. “Oh, but I do love The Seafarer,” she had said with that bright
look of hers.
Lisi was fond of
saying things like “Knowing Latin makes you a better person” and “Knowing Grimm’s
Law is like having The Force.” I believe both of those statements with every
bit of my being.
I met Lisi at the
end of my first year of graduate school. I was coming to terms with the fact
that studying pure critical theory, which I had wanted to do, not only would make
me less marketable as a scholar but also that it was too damned depressing for
me to make a career out of studying it.
Having settled on
medieval literature, which had always interested me for personal and
professional reasons, I approached my department chair, who told me without
hesitation that I needed to have Lisi chair my master’s thesis.
Lisi did not know a
thing about me other than what little the department chair told her about me by
way of introduction and what little I nervously added about my background and
interests when we met.
Lisi unhesitatingly
took me under her wing. She was just that kind of person. And she built me up
for the next 9 years.
On the day of my prospectus
defense, Lisi confidently told me, “This won’t take long. You know more about
the subject than I do.”
When the draft of
my dissertation that I initially planned to defend wasn’t what my committee expected,
Lisi made it a point to tell me that I was a great writer.
Lisi’s faith in me
never wavered, even when I was at my lowest and had little faith that I could
finish. On the day I graduated, Lisi was every bit as excited as I was, for me,
and for everyone graduating with me.
Lisi made studying medieval
literature cool. She once brought authentic Danish axes to class to help her
students visualize what Sir Gawain was facing when the Green Knight was about
to behead him, or so Sir Gawain thought.
Lisi was unapologetically
a nerd. Her office was filled with replicas of trebuchets, posters of medieval
towns, and the like. And she wore things like earrings shaped like axes to
class.
I was but one of
the thousands of students that Lisi helped succeed. I would sit outside her
office waiting my turn to see her while she was advising undergraduates. Students
would go into her office, shoulders drooping, faces hanging. Invariably, they
would leave smiling or laughing, shoulders held high.
I’ve been reading
all the comments friends and colleagues have been posting about Lisi on
Facebook today. Like them, I am heartbroken that Lisi is no longer with us. I
keep wishing that the news of her death isn’t true, even though I know it is.
But I am also
thinking about the boundless energy Lisi shared with me and everyone who met
her. I am thinking about her infectious smile. I am thinking about the way she laughed.
And I am thinking about her rolling along to Surfin’ USA.
