Cynthia Nazarian
Winter 2025 Interview
Cynthia Nazarian
Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence
By Laura Ferdinand, Assistant Director of Content and Communication
In spring of 2024, Northwestern's Office of the Provost honored Cynthia Nazarian with a University Teaching Award, recognizing her innovative curricular leadership and considerable contributions to student learning. Recently, the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and Distinguished Fellow of the Searle Center shared the ways she encourages students to engage unfamiliar perspectives and work through challenging course materials, building in moments to take pride in their accomplishments.
Please tell me about your approach to teaching. Do you have a philosophy or core principles that guide you?
As a specialist of Renaissance literature, I spend most of my time in the period between 1500 and 1630 CE. I also happen to teach most of my classes in French. The early modern period is remote in time and language, and the mores are often foreign to my students. Faced with the prospect of approaching literature in a very old version of a non-native language, students routinely start out nervous.
However, I feel it’s important not to downplay the difficulty of the material we study. I encourage them to push through the unfamiliarity with heavy doses of encouragement and enthusiasm, and during the term I signpost the progress they’ve made so that my students can feel the extent of their accomplishment. I’ve been enormously impressed with their ability to work through challenging materials, which contradicts the common assumption that students prefer simple or easily digestible material.
You have said that you are “a comparatist both by training and by disposition.” It is clear how this manifests in your research, but how does it inform your approach to teaching and how you make iterative changes?
Comparative work by its nature puts ideas and contexts into conversation with each other. To me, this implies that distinct viewpoints or contexts, no matter how divergent, have the potential to enrich one another by coming into contact. One of my favorite thinkers, the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, argues that education should involve travel and frequenting people from varied walks of life and professions “in order to file and sharpen [one’s] mind against those of others.” I see difference as both productive and revelatory.
With that in mind, I encourage my students to explore the unfamiliar as a critical lens. What can the conflicts, prejudices and perspectives of the early modern period tell us about ourselves? By exploring the past’s weirdness and the ways it may unsettle us, our very distance from the early modern period can provide a more comfortable entryway into today’s challenging issues. In my teaching, I try to leverage both difference and relevance by seeking out points of contact across distances of time, place and viewpoint.
What advice would you give to new educators about building and maintaining resilience in their teaching practice?
My own pedagogical training was somewhat quirky in that I was asked to teach pedagogy only a couple of years after I had first started teaching myself. You can imagine how unprepared I felt. One good thing to come from my inexperience was it made both a close eye and light feet indispensable—tools which are still central to my teaching. I think it’s important to check in often with students both individually and as a group to track the progress of a class along the way. Comments on CTECs help our future students, not our current ones. I believe that asking for student feedback over the course of the quarter allows me to keep that close eye on how well the course is meeting their needs while challenging them to continue moving forward. I also value light feet—that is, standing ready to adjust and make substantive changes mid-course in response to how students are advancing the material.
Recently, the idea of resilience has taken on a vital aspect of self-care, which can feel individual and quiet. But your research reminded me of another facet of resilience that is outward-facing and dynamic, especially the way writers and poets can challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. What does your research on Early Modern Europe suggest about the ways contemporary people can cultivate resilience within our current global contexts?
My research explores the connections between violence and voice in early modern texts, and the ways in which vulnerability can ground unique and seemingly paradoxical forms of agency. Early modern poets might channel political critique or religious resistance through the position of the suffering lover, for instance. Or women writers could reveal the omnipresent threat of sexual violence by appropriating the language of male-coded honor. Through my research, my advising and my teaching, I’ve come to believe that Voice = Access. And moreover, it seems that very little can overtake the resilience of the voice that refuses to be silenced, but continues reaching out in spite of struggle.
Last spring, you received the University Teaching Award from the Office of the Provost for demonstrating excellence and innovation in undergraduate teaching. What does this award mean to you in terms of your journey and growth as an educator?
Quite simply, this has been the greatest honor of my career so far. Given how remote and specialized my research is, the classroom is where I feel most directly useful, and where my scholarly work comes alive. I am deeply honored by the faith of my students, and I look forward to continuing to learn from them in my teaching practice.