Champion of Curiosity

“The classroom is where it’s at for me,” Lydia Lundgren says emphatically. “The power of language, the power of storytelling, and how these kids learn to know themselves and the story they want to tell.” A former political science professor, Lundgren began her time at Bishop’s as a substitute teacher in the history department. But the School soon offered her the opportunity to return to her first true love: literature.

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, Lundgren was a history major but took so many English classes she could easily have changed departments. After college, her work on an asylum case at a law firm led her to pursue a master’s degree in counter-terrorism and peace building at St. Andrews in Scotland; from there she went on to UCSD for a PhD in political science. All along, that early pull toward stories remained: “In every single degree, even though they weren’t English degrees, I studied literature in some way,” she explains. “And so instead of one particular genre, I’m an expert in language itself and how words are used to effect change. My PhD taught me that everything is story.”

This wide-ranging perspective has proved fortuitous for Bishop’s English department. Lundgren has taught everything from detective fiction to American literature, narrative fiction, film as literature, and honors English since 2019. This year she’s teaching honors writing along with her mainstay, ninth-grade English.

The range gives her a chance to continually consider what she believes are two of the most important pedagogical questions: “What are we starting these students with?” and “What are we sending them out with?” To that end, her favorite ninth-grade texts include work by Jamaica Kincaid, Gabriel García Márquez, Annie Dillard and Nicole Krauss, while older students dive into more complex works like Julian Barnes’s “Sense of an Ending” and Italo Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.” As they read and discuss, she watches her students transform over the years from “kids who are not really aware yet of their own ability to have perspective on a piece,” to sophisticated thinkers who never fail to impress her with their determination to tackle a challenging story.

The Lead with Purpose campaign aims to ensure that Bishop’s can attract faculty like Lundgren in the future and keep them here. With every class, every supportive moment, she and her colleagues are helping Bishop’s students unlock their fullest potential.

“The English classroom is perfect for building curiosity skills,” Lundgren says. “I want them to leave knowing how to be curious, trusting their curiosity, and just being quiet enough, long enough, to hear it within themselves.” Then she adds, “Curiosity is a very good investigator of what we care about. Keep following the thing that intrigues you, and you will find your purpose.”