New Italian professor arrives at University

By Ryan McGeeney

Monday, November 24, 2008

When Crystal Hall, assistant professor of Italian, began her undergraduate studies at Cornell University nearly a decade ago, she had already decided what she was going to do with her life — and it didn’t have much to do with the Renaissance.

“I was either going to be a cardiologist or an oncologist,” Hall said. “I arrived thinking that was what I just had to do, that it was what I was going to do, that I would enjoy it and that it would be fantastic.”

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Photo by Ryan McGeeney

Crystal Hall, Assistant Professor of Italian, grades students in an Italian language course during a class exercise in which groups of students conduct rehearsed conversations in the language. Hall completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring and came directly to the University to begin teaching this fall.

There was just one problem.

“It turned out that I really didn’t enjoy the classes so much,” Hall said.

Hall started college as a biological sciences major, but by the third of her nine years in higher education, she had made the drastic switch to Italian language and literature. Large universities like Kansas don’t typically hire newly-minted Ph.D.s, but when Hall applied to the University’s French and Italian department, she was welcomed with open arms, and Hall began teaching this fall.

Hall’s decision to study biological sciences wasn’t random — by her sophomore year at Cornell, she had already dedicated two summers to internships researching protein interaction with blood vessels and tumor growth and had contributed to at least one published scholarly article. The decision to abandon the field wasn’t made lightly, either.

“After the two summers doing research, I realized that that kind of work would burn me out pretty quickly,” Hall said. “I wasn’t giving me the satisfaction I wanted. It was really hard to look cancer patients in the eye and try to help them understand what was going on. I realized it wasn’t for me, and this, instead, is.”

When Hall began studying biological sciences her freshman year, she also took an Italian language course, continuing an interest that began in high school. At the end of two years, Hall found that her parallel path in language was outshining her original major, as she achieved both higher proficiency and greater satisfaction in Italian than in the sciences.

“I’d fallen in love with Italian in high school, and it just struck me,” Hall said. “Organic chemistry did me in, and the same semester, I took an Italian literature course, loved it, and decided to go abroad. When I came back, I changed majors, changed schools, and that was it.”

photo

Photo by Ryan McGeeney

Crystal Hall, Assistant Professor of Italian, completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring and came directly to the University to begin teaching this fall. After an initial foray into the biological sciences, Hall completely redirected her studies and achieved the unusual feat of beginning her teaching career at a major university.

Because Hall had progressed well in the language even while pursuing a biological sciences degree, she managed not only to graduate in four years, but also to obtain a graduate teaching assistantship from the University of Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, a five-year fellowship that provided doctoral students tuition and an opportunity to begin a teaching career.

In an era when an increasing number of liberal arts majors fail to graduate in four years, Hall went from undergraduate freshman to Ph.D. recipient in nine. Even if she had started her undergraduate career focused on a language degree, it would have been nearly impossible to complete the coursework any faster. Almost as astonishing is Hall’s appointment to the University of Kansas immediately after graduate school. Most new Ph.D.s do not begin their teaching career at a school the size of the University.

There is no indication that Hall is slowing down. While managing the normal schedule of a tenure-track professor by teaching two courses each semester, Hall is currently expanding her doctoral dissertation — which studied the influence of literary classics on the scientific and philosophical treatises of Galileo — into a larger book. Hall traveled to Chicago during fall break on a grant from the Newbury Consortium to complete a paper on a 17th century poet who described Galileo in a fictional work, and she is laying the groundwork to attend a Mediterranean studies conference in the summer.

“A lot of people say that you’re lucky if you start writing by the second semester,” Hall said. “But I really want to stay on track. I love my projects, and that helps. I don’t want to let things sit and grow dusty, then go back to them after I’ve come up with other ideas. I’m already starting folders for new projects and new ideas. To be fair to what I’ve already done, I need to get it out. Whether that’s unusual or not, I don’t know.”

— — Edited by Rachel Burchfield

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