 "Photo: Ben Dayton / UCD Advocate")
There are books all over the place, leaning off of shelves and sprawled over the floor with yellow sticky notes popping off their paperback covers. A couple posters dot the walls next to kid art and an oil painting of Walt Whitman done by a student. It’s the kind of office most imagine belongs to a really bright, slightly eccentric literature professor, someone like Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society.
Gillian Silverman, assistant professor in the UC Denver English Department, may not demand that her students stand on their desks or rip up their books, but maybe that’s because she just really likes books. Especially since she is sending her own, Bodies And Books, off into the world of academic publishing.
Her five-chapter book focuses on how 19th-century Americans thought about the act of reading, and their relationship to books.
“A lot of academic work takes away from the pleasures of reading,” Silverman said, “which is partly why my book is about trying to get back to reading as a pleasurable activity.”
“There’s something about the bound book that’s special that I don’t really want to give up,” she said.
But when she thinks about the fact that her book will be released to the world, there’s a little tension in her voice, maybe even a little fear. “I can imagine just keeping it and not sending it off for a really long time. So I need to just let it go,” Silverman said. “And once it’s done, normalcy might be restored back into my life.”
But what is normal, really, for a female Ph.D. with a fellow professor, Philip Joseph, for a husband, and three boys under 6?
“It’s hard to balance,” Silverman said. “They’re amazing kids, but they’re also like all kids, very demanding. So it’s hard. That’s my biggest struggle. To feel like I’m doing a good job as a professor and a researcher, and at the same time to do a good job as a mother.”
On top of those responsibilities, she said, she rarely feels like she achieves balance without suffering a loss somewhere else.
Sometimes she manages to do the work/mother thing, she said. “But I feel like even that balance can feel like there’s lots of other stuff being left out.”
“I’m not spending time with friends, or spending time alone reading, or spending time with people who I love,” she said.
With a passion for women’s and gender studies, there’s even more for her to spend time on besides work, family, her manuscript, and maybe Dewey-decimaling her office. Besides working on the board of advisors for the Advocate, Silverman works with a professor from UC Colorado Springs on their project Feminism and Company—a series of interactive arts events geared toward exploring women’s lives.
Silverman isn’t afraid to admit she’s human—even though she got her undergraduate from Brown and her doctorate from Duke University—and that sometimes she can’t do it all, all the time. But that doesn’t stop her from trying, even if her office becomes a mess in the process.
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