Sheila Liming’s I.S. leads to publication in new anthology

When Sheila Liming graduated from The College of Wooster in 2005 with a double major in English and women’s studies, she decided to spend a year working in the college’s writing center before heading off to graduate school. One day her boss, Bill Macauley, associate professor of English and director of the center, showed her a call for papers he had received from the editor of a new anthology, Queer Popular Culture. Knowing that Liming had done an interdisciplinary Independent Study on the role of literature in the development of identity and orientation among lesbian women, he suggested that she write an article based on her I.S. work and submit it for consideration.

Two years and several revisions later, Liming’s article, “Reading for It: Lesbian Readers Constructing Culture and Identity through Textual Experience,” has a prominent place in the anthology, which was published in May by Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Not bad for someone who has just completed a master’s degree in literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and will begin working toward a Ph.D. there this fall.

Liming’s accomplishment, however, comes as no shock to the professors who knew her best at Wooster.

“As an I.S. student, Sheila was very self-motivating,” said Joanne Frye, professor of English, and one of Liming’s two I.S. advisers. “She knew the questions she wanted to explore and…figured out strategies for approaching them. ”

“She’s very intellectually serious,” adds her other adviser, Heather Fitz Gibbon, professor of sociology. “She just grabs hold of ideas and goes with them on her own. And she’s a beautiful writer. ”

In choosing a topic for her senior Independent Study, Liming says, “I knew I wanted to do a non-traditional project, but with a primary focus in literature. I also wanted to do something that involved hands-on work with a group of women. ”

She met both goals by conducting lengthy interviews with a dozen women, exploring the significance of lesbian literature in their lives, and the ways in which the sharing of those texts drew them into a “community of readership. ”

“Literature, historically a vessel through which we as humans seek to obtain a sense of relation and identity,” she wrote, “is made all the more significant in the lives of gay and lesbian individuals, for whom a social and communal context may not be readily available or accessible. ”

The experience of doing an interdisciplinary I.S. proved to be excellent preparation for graduate school.

“Grad school really demands a very high level of independent scholarship and independent thinking, which is precisely what I did at Wooster, not just in I.S., but in other classes as well, ” Liming says.

Despite the rigors of her coursework at Carnegie Mellon, she finds time to play the bagpipes in several local groups. A piper since she was 15, Liming received a Scottish arts scholarship at Wooster and played in the college ’s pipe band for four years, including a year as pipe major.

She looks forward to getting some teaching experience as a doctoral student, and ultimately hopes to teach at a liberal arts college like Wooster, where there is a high level of faculty interaction with students.

“A liberal arts college was really perfect for me,” Liming says. “I really benefited from getting my feet wet and figuring out what I wanted to do. ”