Guinevere MacLowry
Multimedia Journalist
Saundra Liggins, associate professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, just wants you to pick up a book and start reading.
Liggins was looking for jobs fresh out of undergrad when she found SUNY Fredonia’s English department. She has been working there since 2001, and she will begin her 26th year this fall. She says it’s not just her department that keeps her coming back, but the campus community as a whole.
Her academic journey has covered a lot of ground. As an undergraduate, Liggins was drawn to contemporary literature, but novels by African American authors from the early-to-mid 20th century inspired her to pursue her PhD. Once she began her research, her focus shifted to the 19th century. When she began teaching, she went back to the 20th century and curated a blended curriculum depending on the students she had in her classroom that semester.
“I think that’s one of the nice things about teaching is that every semester it can be new, right?” Liggins said. “You’re sort of starting over again, a new set of students, even if you’re teaching the same books … they’re responding differently.”
Liggins finds herself connecting with texts she was once unenthusiastic about and sometimes struggling to connect students with books she loves. Teaching, for Liggins, is its own kind of discovery; the scholar will bring this mentality to her lecture on the history of black women’s literature, kicking off the Innovator-In-Residency series at 4 p.m. today at the African American Heritage House, located at 40 Scott.
Liggins will set Week One’s theme — “Icons and Instigators: Women Who Change the World” — in motion by discussing three notable Black female authors and the ways she sees them as innovative figures in African American literature. Abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston and legendary novelist Toni Morrison will anchor Tuesday’s discussion.
In graduate school at the University of Southern California, San Diego, Liggins focused her research on gothic literature and the ways Black American culture lends itself so aptly to horror and sci-fi. She believes those genres are a natural pathway to thinking about gothic literature; students are familiar with quintessential monsters like Dracula or Frankenstein through movies and TV, and that accessibility opens up gateways of curiosity in the classroom for her students and for Liggins herself.
“I thought that was just something that white authors wrote about, and I didn’t really know that there were Black people or people of color in general writing science fiction,” Liggins said. “I read (Octavia Butler’s Kindred) as an undergrad and thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that literature could be that or do that.’”
Whether it’s contemporary African American literature, a gothic fiction classic or a trending audiobook, Liggins loves it all and said she believes that reading in any form is something to celebrate.
“I’m always happy when a student likes reading.” Liggins said. “Magazines or websites or the sports section of newspapers — all of that is reading. It doesn’t need to be sort of high-minded fiction, it can be whatever.”
Liggins imagines that the audience will have “a wide array of knowledge” about literature in general, and she’s not there to judge anyone for where they’re starting from. She hopes that people come to the lecture with curiosity and an open mind.
“There isn’t a test, right?” Liggins said. “You’re not going to be quizzed on anything after … I hope that people will come with whatever they’re coming with and they leave with maybe something more than they thought they would.”
She said she knows reading can feel intimidating; struggling through dense passages or rereading pages that make no sense can be discouraging, but the hardest part is just getting started.
“It’s nice to talk about what you like or what you find confusing with other people, but you shouldn’t let that be a stumbling block to just reading the book yourself,” Liggins said. And maybe it seems hard or complicated…like you’d never understand it, but just give it a shot.”
