Excerpt:

Associate Professor of Spanish Kelly Comfort went to college with plans to become a broadcast journalist. But, like many students, she found that the reality didn’t meet her expectations, and she just didn’t like what she was studying. Taking her first class in comparative literature changed her life.

“The professor was incredible,” she said. “I was rather shy in the classroom, and he had a way of getting me to talk. He would play devil’s advocate and really draw the students in.”

In some ways, it was that professor — Eric Downing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — who inspired Comfort and made her interested in the field of literature.

“I realized that being a literature professor allowed me to do the same things that had drawn me to journalism — public speaking, writing, and having knowledge of the world and applying it in certain ways,” she said.

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