Meet FOCIF Steering Chair Suzanne Lye
September 9, 2024 | Ruby Wang
“My aim is to create a place where people can feel accepted for who they are in their whole beings, not just in relation to what they’re teaching or what they research,” said Suzanne Lye on her term as the Steering Committee Chair for the Faculty of Color and Indigenous Faculty Group.
The FOCIF Group provides support, community, and professional development for faculty of color and Indigenous faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill. Lye identified the group as “an important place for people to discuss shared interests and to ask questions both about how to interact with other colleagues who come from different cultural settings and how to interact with the university more broadly, which is its own cultural setting.”
Every faculty member comes from a different background, and each followed a unique path to arrive at UNC-Chapel Hill. Rather than hiding these differences, Lye aims to foster dialogue and a welcoming environment for FOCIF Group members to discuss challenges and build a community that respects, honors, and celebrates the work that everyone is doing at UNC to thrive and support others’ success.
Lye received her A.B. at Harvard, studying organic chemistry and the history of antibiotics. After working in tech for a few years, she pursued her Ph.D. in classics from UCLA, and subsequently was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth. She comes from an immigrant background and was the first in her immediate family to attend graduate school. “My parents were not upper middle class when I was growing up. They’re professionals; they’re not in the university system,” said Lye.
“Many faculty of color come from backgrounds with parents who are not university professors; they may have come from a different country or a different system of education with different university governance,” said Lye. “As a faculty member of color and someone who worked outside of academia for a few years, I sometimes have a little bit more to learn about how to interact with students, colleagues, and administrators.”
When Lye arrived at Carolina, the first thing she sought out was an intellectual community to support faculty in the humanities. When she found the IAH, she joined the FOCIF Group and befriended colleagues and mentors. In spring 2024, Lye was an IAH Faculty Fellow, where she focused on her project, “To Starve and To Curse: Women’s Anger in Ancient Greek Literature and Magic.” Lye’s time with the IAH helped prepare her for the professionalism, expectations, and interpersonal communication that are not usually taught as part of graduate school curricula.
Now, as FOCIF Steering Committee Chair, Lye seeks to extend mentorship opportunities and knowledge sharing among faculty of color and Indigenous faculty. “I’m hoping to have more frequent activities, more frequent contact. I hope some of the activities we have in mind on the steering committee will help people feel like there’s a special environment where they can show more of who they are and be their true selves.”
Outside of her time as FOCIF steering committee chair, Lye is an assistant professor for the department of classics. This fall, she is teaching two courses: Classical Mythology and Intermediate Greek. In the past, she has taught the popular First-Year Seminar on Ancient Magic and Religion, which you can read about here. Her first book Life / Afterlife: Revolution and Reflection in the Ancient Greek Underworld from Homer to Lucian, published in September, is available from Oxford University Press.
View the FOCIF webpage to learn more about the group and future programming.
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