Assistant Professor of English Lecia Rosenthal sits dwarfed by the enormous bookcase in her office in East Hall. A slender, stylish woman, she is surrounded by some of the most influential literature in modern history - from Virginia Woolf to Joseph Conrad to countless others.
Today, Rosenthal leads a comfortable life teaching "Conrad, Forster and Woolf" and "Death and Literature in the 20th Century" in the English department. But her story reaches far beyond the walls of the classroom. Before she came to Tufts, Rosenthal's life took her from New York to Hollywood, from America to Paris, and from student to teacher as she pursued her passion for modern literature.
She searches her bookcase for a poem written about the influence of football in her hometown. Rosenthal grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, a small mill town that she called "truly a culturally forsaken place." She attended a small public school before transferring to a boarding school in Philadelphia in ninth grade.
Rosenthal attended Brown University for her undergraduate degree, because she said she "thought it would be a challenging place to become an adult." There, she discovered an interest in literature and graduated in 1992 with a degree in British literature.
After graduation, Rosenthal lived in Paris for a year after receiving a grant to study 19th century architecture there. In France, she decided that studying literature was her calling, and began pursing life as a "poor academic," she said.
When she returned to the United States, Rosenthal studied at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature. She said it was interesting to be a student in the humanities just before the dot-com bust in the 1990s.
"If you weren't working at a start-up, [people thought] you were opting out of a path of riches," she said. "You were constantly reminded that what you did didn't fit into a profitable society ... didn't fit into capitalism."
During graduate school, Rosenthal decided to try her hand as a Hollywood scriptwriter. But she said she didn't get along very well with executives in the movie business.
"They're interested in Aristotle, but only to make a profit in the box office," she said.
Rosenthal and a friend co-wrote a movie script based on the play "Antigone." They saw screenwriting as a fun, easy way to make a little money and wrote the script's first draft in a week. Finishing and perfecting the final product became a side career for the next four years.
The screenplay, originally titled "The Shallow End," was about two characters who were HIV-positive. One of the characters was considering giving HIV to a senator's son. Rosenthal said the story reflected the shift in AIDS discourse in the '90s.
But producers in Hollywood thought the story would be hard to market to a mainstream audience, and Rosenthal said she was frustrated by the pressure to change the script. She finally sold the script to producers.
"[Hollywood] is not a place for writers," she said. "There is a bottom line ... A hit is all that matters."
The final product was called "Poster Boy," a film about a conservative politician whose homosexual son comes out of the closet during election season. Ironically, Rosenthal and her co-author won the Outstanding Screenwriting Award at the Los Angeles Outfest for the script.
After graduating with her Ph.D., Rosenthal turned from student to teacher when she came to Tufts in 2001. She said her course "Death and Literature in the 20th Century" has helped her cope with issues outside of the classroom, such as her father's recent death.
"Teaching this class made it possible to speak to my father about his dying," she said.
She said thinking and reading about darker themes is important.
"People always think [the class topics] are depressing, and they are, but it's okay because we have the rest of the day to compensate ... Sometimes it's important to be depressed," she said.
In addition to teaching, Rosenthal is also writing a book on catastrophe and memory in the 20th century. The book is a science fiction narrative that discusses the end of the world and the way the threat of catastrophe has become a source of entertainment as well as political discourse.
"You can see it in the 20th century," she said. "World War II, the threat of species annihilation, the Cold War, [especially with] the nuclear threat."
According to Rosenthal, threat of disaster has been incorporated into popular culture through cinema and literature. She gave examples such as the apocalyptic fiction novel series "Left Behind," the 2004 movie "The Day After Tomorrow," and the H.G. Wells novel-turned-movie "War of the Worlds" (2005).
When she finishes this book, Rosenthal said, she already has plans for her next book, which will focus on aging and categories of obsolescence.
In the meantime, Rosenthal said, she enjoys working at Tufts.
"Students are smart, unpretentious and hardworking," she said. "Unlike Columbia, it's not a culture that promotes rampant competition [or] diva professors."
