The connections between a person's past and present are not always clear-cut. In the case of Lecturer Abby Zanger, a winding path of comics, magazines, and books eventually led her to the front of a crowded college classroom to speak about sexuality and gender issues.
Zanger grew up around books and controversy. Her father was a wholesale book and magazine distributor who became heavily involved with issues of censorship after anti-obscenity prosecution flared up against magazine distributors for mailing publications like "Playboy."
But it wasn't the Comstock Law, which legislates against "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" materials, that got Zanger interested in books. "I used to go down to my dad's office as a kid and I would read books and comic books," she said. "My father had a huge warehouse of books and I could take them home ... it was better than a library."
Seeing books from a different angle - sitting in a warehouse, stacked and separated by publishers - allowed Zanger to experience books in a different way, rather than just as "vehicles of ideas."
"I knew where books came from, so I thought about them in a more cultural way," she said.
But she didn't expect her path would put her at the front of a classroom. "When I went to grad school I didn't think of myself first as a teacher, but I had to teach right away. I realized I enjoyed the experience; it was a surprise to me that I enjoyed teaching so much," she said. "But it definitely wasn't a childhood dream to teach."
But now that she is a lecturer, Zanger has found her favorite part of teaching has been learning from the people she instructs.
"I'm interested in learning from my students - otherwise I get bored. I love when I give students material and it's not fully digested, and they have to return to me what they got out of it and they get things I never would have thought of," she said.
Zanger's interests lie in sexuality and gender in early modern Europe, a field that covers both literary studies and history.
As a lecturer in the history department, Zanger's research has produced several books, including "Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power."
She attributes her interests to the growing popularity of gender studies that occurred when she was young. "A lot of us in my generation started doing gender studies," she said. "We realized that you couldn't just look at history or study literature from all the great men; you had to look at women, too."
As an undergraduate, Zanger was interested not only in women's studies, but in how gender played a role for both women and men, particularly in images of sexuality.
She said that her early exposure to comic books, which use images and text to tell stories, has helped her to study sexuality. "I'm a reader of images and a reader of text, so I was very attentive to details and I started thinking about how sexuality fit into images," she said.
"I was interested in how images got conflated with sexuality," she said, "especially around male political figures, conflating virility with political power, and women and their position in the world."
Since beginning her professorial career, Zanger has noticed big changes in both literary studies and history. "Ten or 15 years ago, literary theory was on the cutting edge of ideas, but now history is a much more vibrant and innovative field," she said.
"I think it's a natural evolution. History has engaged with multiple different cultures and different disciplines," she said. "History has done a great job of engaging with anthropology, political science. I think I'm an example of the way history has become so interdisciplinary."
The changes Zanger has noticed since she earned her Ph.D have been personal as well as professional. "I have learned so much along the way. Every time you earn a degree, you think you know certain things, but now I realize how much more I know about my own field than I knew even 20 years ago," she said.
"My interest has really broadened and shifted and changed. If I knew then what I know now, the beginning of my teaching career would have been easier."
Students might expect Zanger to be a more reserved bookworm-type, but she's far from it: it's impossible to talk to her without laughing. She speaks assertively, but with a wry sense of humor.
This sense of humor has remained constant. "I think of myself as a boring person, but I do have a sense of humor and I don't take things too seriously," she said. "I want people to know that I am serious about my work, but not too serious."
Zanger's work is supplemented by her life at home. "I have an 11-year-old son who's fantastic, and he teaches me every day about being a teacher," she said.
"It's interesting to watch how young kids learn. It's very primal. I've learned a lot of things about how people learn, but when he was a baby, I could see how there are very universal ways of learning."
"He takes me places I never would think I was going to go. He sparks an interest in me for things that I thought would never interest me, like reading children's books and playing children's computer games," she added.
And occasionally, her position as a history researcher overlaps with her son's learning processes. "He's obsessed with the History Channel, so he's constantly asking me questions about obscure historical things. He tells me the dates of historical events that I have no clue about," she said, laughing as usual.
