Samhi C.

When asked why she became a teacher, Dr. Liliana Marika Naydan, an Associate Professor for English and American Studies and the Writing Program Coordinator at the Pennsylvania State University Abington Campus, said, “I guess the short answer to that is because I love learning… We can all learn from one another.”

I’ve had Dr. Naydan for two semesters now in my college career, and I noticed how each time her courses were structured in discussion-based formats with a diverse reading selection, and I’ve never once heard her say an answer was wrong. Perhaps some are better proven, but all are valid to their own measure. She promotes an emotionally healthy learning environment for her students, asking us to critique works and not authors – whether it be a professional author whose work we are reading in class or one of us, her students – and constantly encouraging us to be open and honest but also valuing our right to privacy.

I’m biased to some degree; I value Dr. Naydan as a professor and a mentor and so when I decided I’d like to do a second profile piece on a Penn State professor for The Abington Sun, she was my first choice.

Through an interview with her one Thursday after the ENGL 135H: Alternative Voices in American Literature course that she is teaching this semester remote-synchronously via Zoom, I learned more about her life, her childhood and upbringing, her education, and how she landed at Abington as an English professor. 

As it is with many of us, Dr. Naydan’s introduction to books and reading came in the format of bedtime stories. “I had a weird experience with reading as a child… my earliest memories of reading are reading in Ukranian… My grandmother [read] ‘The Turnip’… All about how members of a family have to work together to get a turnip out of the ground… I loved this story and I loved the way she read it to me.” Meanwhile, her father, Dr. Michael M. Naydan was already teaching Ukrainian Language and Literature at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) at the University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania. I suppose ‘like father, like daughter’ is an apt description. While the senior Dr. Naydan made UPark an epicenter in America for studying Ukrainian literature – a subject that doesn’t have much of a spotlight – his daughter is spending her career passing on her love of literature written in the English language to generations of students to come right here at Abington. 

As a young girl, Dr. Naydan got to meet with many Ukrainian writers without even realizing the importance of those meetings, and got to learn a lot about Ukrainian and learn the importance of all literature because of her father. While coming from a bilingual family ultimately manifested into a deep connection with diverse literature, unfortunately as a child Dr. Naydan wasn’t able to immediately see the benefits of having another language than English as a first language. “In school, I realized I was a slow reader in English… It made me feel bad about myself. It made me feel that maybe I’m not that good of a reader… I didn’t fully realize the value of having two vocabularies… I feel I didn’t go to an elementary school that valued that… Historically, teachers didn’t always value bilingualism or multilingualism in the same way that many of them do now.” 

Eventually, she attended the Delta Program High School in State College, an alternative high school that immensely valued creative writing. And diverse writing. Dr. Naydan says, they “let us read a wide range of texts. Different from what students were reading in standard classrooms.” Via the Delta Program, she was also able to take college level courses from Penn State for high school credit, allowing a deeper level of learning. Two specific courses that she remembers taking are ENGL 191: Science Fiction and ENGL 104: The Bible as Literature. Through the latter course, she and her classmates were able to explore “all these literary features in a text that’s so political and not many people consider literary.” Now, years later, Dr. Naydan says all writing is political even if it tries not to be. 

One of her two research areas is 21st Century Literature. “I think we’re living in such interesting times. And I love the way 21st century lit is capturing really peculiar developments… in social justice.” Via her literary endeavours, Dr. Naydan explores a variety of social issues including but not limited to “terrorism, globalization as a new kind of colonization, racism, [and] sexism”. About the authors of much 21st century literature, she says, “Maybe they’re not engaging in protests in the street – well, maybe some of them are – but their novels and their stories sort of work as protests.” She also appreciates 21st century literature for its relatability: “I love how easily twenty-first century literature speaks to the students I teach [and] I like thinking about how this literature is a part of my own life experience.”

Her second research area is Writing Centers. She discusses how they “reflect our politically hard times.” They’re spaces in which we think about language and “language is always political… has to do with who I am… with my race, my nationality, my gender”. Dr. Naydan says, “Writing is a cultural contact zone… [You] get to meet writers with very different identities from your own and learn about them and help them develop persuasive voices that speak to who they are. [And] everything that a writing center is is what I try to make my classroom. Where we can really talk to one another, where we can learn from one another.” 

Dr. Naydan’s first introduction to a writing center, which she says was her “first introduction to writing pedagogy”, came when she was a student herself. Being a State College local and with her father working at Penn State, she attended UPark with a seventy-five percent discount on fees and ironically, though she was an English minor her entire time as an undergraduate, English was “not [her] first major, but it was [her] last.” She started as an art major, then switched to history, and later medieval studies, but she was still unsure if those subjects were right for her. Eventually, her experience in the UPark Writing Center in which she started working her second semester made her wonder why she was studying anything other than English and she declared English as her major by the end of her junior year.

Apart from her experience in the Writing Center, her acquaintance with many of her own English teachers and professors since high school and through college also influenced her to study English and become a professor. For one, she refers to one of her professors, Professor Paul Kellerman who still teaches at UPark, as one of her influencers. She took his ENGL 15 class her first semester of her first year and realized she liked learning about writing and working with peer writers as well as writing mentors. “It was infectious… I wanted to work with more people like those English professors I had… They were and they remain excellent teachers… It’s about what an English major actually is and the kind of culture that an English major creates. It’s a culture of collaborative dialogue.”

“It was a long road from my English major to Abington,” says Dr. Naydan. After getting her bachelor’s degree at UPark in 2002, she earned her Masters in English at the University of Delaware in 2005, and then her PhD in English at Stony Brook University in New York in 2011. One common feature between UPark and Stony Brook, according to Dr. Naydan, was the diversity, which made her feel at home. She says these campuses with “so many different kinds of students… already felt like home.” About Stony Brook, she also describes how it was a “tight knit grad community.” 

After Stony Brook, she applied for many jobs and “wound up at [the] University of Michigan”  working as a Lecturer and the Director of the Sweetland Peer Writing Center.  Eventually, she left Michigan seeking out a tenure-track job that provided better institutional support for her research and writing. This career move was important to her because not only she loves research but sees her research as always informing her teaching. It keeps her “work in the classroom alive and exciting”.

Among the couple of different opportunities presented to her, she chose Abington. She says it encompasses some of her “favorite things about [her] favorite institutions”. She makes the statement: “I was a part of Penn State and Penn State was a part of me.” 

On the surface, Dr. Naydan is a teacher, a mother, a wife, a reader and writer, and an informal part-time baker who’s learned to make eggless breads, cookies, and cakes, following her mother’s chocolate chip bread once a week for her daughter who has an egg allergy. She enjoys walks and bike rides with her daughter and husband. Of her nearly-six-year-old daughter, she says, she appreciates “getting to see the world through her eyes and the enthusiasm she has.” In such a casual remark, I got an insight into her mindset, into the core of who she is. She cares about others’ perspectives. 

Their lives, their thoughts, their beliefs. 

It is for this reason that not only is it true that Dr. Naydan is and always will be a part of Penn State as it is a part of her, but she’s a part of what makes Abington such a great learning community. A professor who embraces and promotes open-mindedness and diversity in thought and personality. An embodiment of following one’s passion, doing work that they love that doesn’t feel like work at all. And teaching, not only to teach, but to learn.