A ‘perfect mix’ drew French professor Dr. Nathan Guss to Fort Lewis

Dr. Nathan Guss

How does a kid growing up in western Massachusetts end up becoming a professor of French literature? With Quebec just a half-day drive away, Dr. Nathan Guss says that taking French classes beginning in kindergarten and being inspired by an older cousin who majored in French (and kept the young Dr. Guss’s bookshelves stocked with French literature) sparked his love for the language. After spending a summer during high school living in Dijon, France with family friends, Dr. Guss was hooked. He enrolled at Duke University and majored in French and literature and continued his studies at Cornell University. “I’ve always loved the French language and culture, but once I started teaching in grad school, I realized that was what I wanted to do,” says Dr. Guss.

After graduating from Cornell in 2004, Dr. Guss took a position in the Department of Languages at Clemson University in South Carolina. “I discovered at Clemson that my favorite thing about teaching is the personal interaction and mentoring,” he says. Dr. Guss came across an open French professor position at Fort Lewis College and was immediately intrigued. “The wonderful thing about teaching at Fort Lewis is that the expectation is that your job, first and foremost, is to work closely with students.”

In 2008, Dr. Guss joined the Department of Modern Languages at Fort Lewis. “I was pretty thrilled to come to Fort Lewis,” he says. “Here, you have the perfect mix of a high caliber intellectual environment and stunning natural beauty. I’m an avid hiker and mountain biker and I knew I would thrive in a place where you can bike in the tundra in the morning and have an engaged conversation about French literature in the afternoon. Students here seek that same balance.”

A liberal arts curriculum, then, is likely part of the attraction to Fort Lewis for many students, says Dr. Guss. “Fort Lewis students are very well-rounded and interesting people—they all seem to be engaged in something outside the classroom, whether that’s art or music or being active in their tribe or aspiring to become a professional cyclist,” he says. “So I think they appreciate the idea behind liberal arts—that living in a globalized world, it’s crucial to understand other cultures.”

To engage his students—and the Durango community—Dr. Guss has already instituted innovative programs and cultural events. In the spring of 2009, he developed a language partner program with students studying English at Université Laval in Quebec City and Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis in Nice, France. Fort Lewis French students choose a partner, and the pair arranges to speak once a week via Skype, software that enables free video and voice calls on the internet. He also secured a grant from Fort Lewis, another from the Tournées Festival, and put on the first Toujours l’Amour ! The Fort Lewis College French Film Festival in November 2009.

Outside Fort Lewis, exciting things are happening for Dr. Guss as well. His first book, Proust Outdoors, was published in 2009 by Bucknell University Press—a book that began as his Ph.D. dissertation. “To me, Marcel Proust is one of the most important writers of the earliest 20th century,” says Dr. Guss. “He’s famous for shutting himself in a cork-lined room, writing mostly at night, so I’ve tried to show the significance of exterior spaces.” For Dr. Guss, teaching and scholarship fuel one another. “I find that being excited about teaching turns my research in a new direction, and things I’m deeply involved with in my research find their way into the classroom. I don’t really think of them as two separate activities.”

What’s the most exciting part of Dr. Guss’s job? “Watching students evolve from semester to semester—I love that,” he says. “I feel pretty lucky to be a catalyst for critical thinking…to be this guide who gets to watch how language and literature transform students and give them new perspectives on life.”