Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
I stepped into Atticus Bookstore Cafe on Monday, September 9, 2024, where the rattle of the coffee machine punctuated the hum of chattering patrons. Scouring the room, my eyes landed on who I had been searching for: a man with thick, glossy shoulder-length hair, wearing black wireless headphones, and sipping coffee at a table. I weaved through the crowd, dodging the line of people waiting for their daily caffeine fix. He looked up and slipped off his headphones. “Smile, right?” he said. Nodding, I sat down across from him.
As I fished out my pen and notepad, Professor Lloyd Kevin Alimboyao Sy relieved what could have been an awkward silence, asking how my first weeks had been. I was struck by the realization that although he was a professor and I a first-year, we were both new to Yale: this marked his third week as a full-time professor and my third week as a college student. The thought of already having this connection was oddly comforting. With that in mind, it seemed only right for me to start by asking how he ended up at Yale. He took a big sip of his coffee, as if readying himself for a speech, and flashed me a wry smile. “Sorry if I just ramble on. This is the story of my entire life, right?”
***
As we settled into conversation, it became clear that Professor Sy’s journey to Yale was the culmination of his deep commitment to reshaping how we understand intersections of literature, culture, and the environment. A literary historian, Professor Sy studies nineteenth-century American literature, specializing in Indigenous literature and environmental humanities. He arrived at Yale in July 2023 as the third tenure-track faculty member in Native and Indigenous studies that has been hired in the last two years. After spending a year as a postdoctoral associate, he officially began the eight-year tenure track this semester, teaching Comparative World English Literature (ENGL 128) and Region, Indigeneity, and American Literary Realism (ENGL 396).
Professor Sy’s hiring followed student and faculty demands for Yale to engage with Native and Indigenous studies and ethnic studies at-large. In fall 2022, Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Hi‘ilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) joined the major’s faculty, teaching Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ER&M 316). In the same semester, Assistant Professor of ER&M Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) spent her first year at Yale as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on settler colonialism in the early medieval North Atlantic. Together, the recent professorships of Hobart, Andrews, and Sy total the faculty of Native and Indigenous studies at Yale College to four—joining Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), who is Yale College’s first and only tenured Native and Indigenous faculty member.
Professor Sy’s work interrogates the status quo of conventional English department syllabi. Along with Professor Andrews, he is one of only two faculty members at Yale teaching Native and Indigenous literary studies, placing him in a unique position to shape the pedagogies of reading and studying literature in ways the university has yet to bridge. But in order to understand how he arrived in New Haven, we first have to trace all the places he has been. “I have found it rather difficult to discern what I think of a place until leaving it,” he said.
***
Born in Chicago to a Chinese-Filipino father and Filipino mother, Professor Sy did not always know he wanted to become a literary historian. He grew up around a Filipino-American community in Rockford, Illinois, attending Filipino parties on the weekends and praying the rosary. He also spoke Tagalog at home; his parents, both doctors, had immigrated to Illinois from the Philippines in the 1990s. “I have come to recognize the extraordinary privilege of having a thriving ethnic community,” he wrote to me, after our interview. “Many Americans struggle to make community; this is one of the country’s tragedies.” When I ask him about the beginning of his academic trajectory, he comments that his parents wanted their son to pursue a career in medicine.
“I know, it’s kind of a classic story,” he said.
As an undergraduate at Brown University, Professor Sy very quickly decided he would not become a doctor. He began his studies in economics, which he dryly told me was “a very common pathway if you [didn’t] know what else you want[ed] to do.” While completing his economics major requirements, Professor Sy stumbled into an affinity for programming: for him, programming was, and remains, an inherently generative and creative medium of expression. Today, Professor Sy doesn’t program regularly anymore, but uses the skills he learned to enrich his English seminars at Yale. “Still, it’s fun to create little things,” he said—such as a random name generator for class participation he had programmed—“and it’s still a great way to solve a real-world problem.”
Professor Sy told me that his first undergraduate literature seminar was a British romanticism course. Daunted by the sheer talent of his peers in the class—to say nothing of the professor himself—he decided to drop the course. “I like telling the story about being scared of my first literature class to undergrads because I think it’s so common for us to feel intimidated by the talent around us. But you are all always growing, and should try things a second and third time if the first didn’t go so well.”
By the beginning of his senior year, Professor Sy was nominally a computer science major. However, after finishing his programming assignments, he could often be found reading novels at the John D. Rockefeller Library, known affectionately to Brown undergrads as “The Rock.” “Even while doing CS, I was probably reading about 50 to 60 novels a year in my own time,” he tells me, laughing.
Out of fears of limiting himself to programming, Professor Sy resolved to take more English classes during his senior year, having already completed his computer science requirements. Professors such as Jim Egan and Deak Nabers took him under their wings and supported his pursuit of a doctorate degree in English. After graduating with degrees in both computer science and English, he returned to work at a bank in Boston, where he had worked before during his junior undergraduate year. By the second week on the job, he was already applying for graduate school: the next year, he began his Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia.
“I had one overwhelming passion in life, and that was literature,” he told me.
***
Professor Sy credits Radiclani Clytus, a professor of nineteenth-century African-American literature at Brown, for ushering Professor Sy toward turning his passion for literature into a career. “I was this very naive 20-year-old kid who loved novels and writing about novels…but I had absolutely no idea what it meant to be a professor,” he said. In Professor Sy’s words, Clytus encouraged him to enter academia with “a healthy dose of cynicism about what it took to exist in that world.”
Clytus’ encouragement and mentorship proved especially fruitful as he started his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. In 2017, Professor Sy began his doctorate focusing on American literature of the long nineteenth century, a term that refers to the 125-year span between the French Revolution in 1787 and the start of World War I in 1914. At that point, he was still more interested in what we would consider canonical writers of the era, such as Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But Professor Sy had also always been invested in the idea of place—which is “somehow both quite artificial and exceptionally visceral”—and how we are connected to the land. He chose to focus his dissertation on forests and their transformation under the industrialization of deforestation and natural resource extraction, an often overlooked topic in literary studies. Professor Sy wrote his dissertation’s first chapter on James Fenimore Cooper, an American novelist who often had attempted to depict romances between colonial and Indigenous characters between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and is best known for his novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826). After reading the chapter, his dissertation advisor, Emily Ogden—a writer and professor specializing in 19th century American literature—noted, “You’re essentially writing about the dispossession of land, and you’re writing about it from the perspective of white voices. You’re going to have to address Native voices as well.”
Professor Sy embraced the task as a learning opportunity and wrote a second chapter about William Apess (1798-1839), a Pequot tribe member who authored the first published Native American autobiography. As Professor Sy delved into Apess’ account of a forest dispute on what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he started to realize that he needed to center his dissertation around Native perspectives. “They had to be absolutely central to my project, or else it would basically reproduce the myths of classical American manifest destiny,” he explained.
Currently, Professor Sy is writing a book examining Native responses to environmental exploitation caused by settler colonialism. He juxtaposes works from the American logging industry—which significantly expanded and industrialized in the 19th century alongside increased resource extraction and settlement—with writings by Native authors responding to deforestation. For example, the author Simon Pokagon lived in southwest Michigan between the 1850s and 1880s, exactly when lumber companies started destroying whole forests. These particular environmental and historical circumstances intersect in nuanced ways: “To think about a tree in Michigan in the late nineteenth century is to think about these lumber companies,” Professor Sy elaborated. In other words, the juxtaposition is inevitable.
According to Professor Sy, language—not in spite of, but because of its juxtapositions and tensions—shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Therein lies the crux of literary studies: by dissecting a work of literature, readers not only gain insight into the text itself, but also deepen our personal understanding of how language informs our sense of self.
For Professor Sy, this manifests most powerfully in the classroom: “Just last week, we read an autobiography by the Sioux Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá in my senior seminar—I’ve read this book maybe 10, 15 times in my life, but still, my students brought all these new perspectives about the text that I had never considered before.”
I paused from scribbling in my notepad, taken aback by the fact that someone with an English Ph.D. would say this—someone who had spent years practicing close reading. He doesn’t take his expertise for granted. Instead, he approaches teaching as a chance to expand his understanding of his own syllabi. “You can always keep on reading, and I can always become a better reader,” he said. And in this moment, there was a mutual understanding: I, for one, cannot imagine living life without wanting to read more closely—which is to say, to become more and more attentive to the world around us. Learning how to read, then, feeds into learning itself.
And for students, an Indigenous literature course at Yale proved to be a necessary avenue into different ways of engaging with the world. “[Professor Sy] really is such an intelligent human. And his lore is crazy,” said Norah Laughter PC ’26, a student in Professor Sy’s Indigenous and regionalist literature course majoring in American Studies. Norah, who is from a rural town in Southern Kentucky, was drawn to Professor Sy’s attention to regionalist literature—the balance between, as she puts it, “respect[ing] the place that you’re from…while still holding it accountable for what it is, what it’s become, its histories.” For her, Professor Sy’s class offers a space to confront this tension: “It’s important for me to reckon with that and to be alongside others who are also reckoning with it. I want to hear about Indigenous resistance, Indigenous joy, and how it models joy for every other social movement and for other communities, as well as what we can learn and share in that.”
Professor Sy’s class represents ongoing shifts in Yale’s English Department. “[It] has, even in the last five years, greatly broadened its understanding of [which] literature is worth reading,” he remarked. While the push for including more diverse voices in literature is not new—in 2017, the English department revised its major requirements to encompass a wider range of time periods and regions—he noted that there has been a particular “intensification of interest in neglected literatures over the last few years.” The course currently titled Comparative World English Literature (ENGL 128), which Professor Sy is teaching this semester, was created to reflect this more diversified scope of source texts. His addition to the faculty means that there could now be consistent course offerings at Yale devoted to Indigenous literature in the 19th century.
“Having more authors of color and Indigenous writers fundamentally revitalizes the curriculum,” Professor Sy said.
Reflecting on the growing momentum for engaging diversified voices in literary studies, Professor Sy cautioned against framing minority literatures as simply the “opposite” of canonical literature—a reductive perspective that does justice to neither. “It’s not as simple as a ‘dead white male’ canon that is bad and a marginalized, underrepresented literature that is good,” he said. Indigenous literature often explores recurring themes such as the dispossession of land that arises not in isolation but rather from centuries of often assimilationist cultural exchange. Part of the work, then, lies in resisting patterns of thought that seek to tokenize these narratives. “I think it’s important to recognize the revitalization of the English department via these new literatures as not being a departure from the literatures we were reading before,” Professor Sy said. We seem to have arrived at an impasse—we would only have more required reading to do, and we never seem to have more time to read. But what do you read if you only have limited time? Professor Sy refused to give in to such a hypothetical: “I want to say, No, you should have more time to read more.”
***
Tarren Andrews—Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration—echoed Professor Sy’s sentiments on the increased representation of Indigenous perspectives in the English department and at Yale. Although she is on research leave this year, Professor Andrews met with me for an interview at her office on 82-90 Wall St, the newly established home of the ER&M department.
Professor Andrews, who is Bitterroot Salish and a documented descendant of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, emphasized the value of intentionally studying Indigenous perspectives in academia. “[Taking colonial narratives] for granted…creates this version of Indigenous people that is defined entirely by the experience of having been colonized. Like we didn’t exist before then. Like we somehow become Indigenous.” Professor Andrews, who was raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, did not have a single Native teacher until she started her Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado Boulder, under the mentorship of Danika Medak-Saltzman. “That was the first time I understood that Indigenous knowledge is a kind of academic discipline in its own right,” she said.
Last year, Professor Sy and Professor Andrews co-organized the literature and theory panel for the Global History of Indigenous Thought Conference. Though both professors work on Native literature, they focus on very different aspects of the field: Professor Andrews specializes in contemporary and modern poetics, and Professor Sy in novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. “It was interesting to come together…and to talk through our very different approaches to what people often assume is a monolithic subject,” Professor Andrews said. “Our work compliments each other but diverges in really important ways as well.”
The work is far from over—institutions like Yale cannot be content with hiring a few professors in a historically neglected field. Indigenous studies are vital to understanding the cultural landscape of North America and its transformation by settler colonialism. As Professor Andrews puts it, “One person…cannot cover a global, millennia-long tradition of Indigenous storytelling.”
***
Toward the end of our interview, Professor Sy stopped himself mid-sentence to ask if I wanted to talk about his time as a Jeopardy! contestant. I glanced at the margins of my notebook, where I had jotted down “Jeopardy?”. Winning the game show three times felt like the least significant part of his story. Our time at Atticus had unfurled in such a way that felt less like an interview and more like a conversation, mapping a constellation of disparate places across his life. From his upbringing in Rockford and his undergraduate experiences in Providence, to his English doctoral program in Charlottesville, he traced his journey so intricately that I felt like I was witnessing the formation of a map.
For Professor Sy, the question of place is as personal as it is academic. He grapples with the tension between personal history and perception of place, seeking to explain why he loves Rockford. “I am not really sure that the places in which I have lived actually had any effect on me until I decided that they affected me and demanded that I explain my life through those perceived effects; but the arbitrariness of all of this does not, in my mind, counteract their importance or validity,” he wrote to me. “130 years ago, my ancestors were living in southern China or in the northern Philippines. Like, how did we get from that to someone who really, really loves the American Midwest in just three generations, four generations or so, you know?”
I think about myself, how I’ve never felt like I truly belonged in any one place I’ve inhabited—Shenzhen, China; Concord, Massachusetts; and now, New Haven, Connecticut—and how I’ve found homes in where lies between. I want to continue searching for answers about what tethers me to those places, even if they confound me and leave me with more questions. The task is confronting these tensions, not necessarily resolving them. Professor Sy’s philosophy resonated with me: we are, after all, “in charge of our own structuring stories.” Before wrapping up our conversation, I asked Professor Sy what has surprised him most about being at Yale. “I think I’ve just been surprised by how gentle of a place it can be…I have, in some sense, habituated to being here and being [in] New Haven,” he said. His words hung in the air. Professor Sy embraces the possibilities of a new place, which I continue to search for myself in this university. During these dizzying first weeks, it is easy to lose oneself in the pursuit of more—to feel uprooted. Our conversation reminded me that finding my place is as much about turning inward as much as it is about looking outward. Finding belonging, after all, is also an ongoing process of becoming. Professor Sy’s words remain with me during this search—I paused once again in that hour, struck by his use of the word “gentle.”