UPDATED: April 25, 2018 at 4:18 p.m.

Editor’s note: The “Who is Syracuse?” series runs in The Daily Orange every spring to highlight individuals who embody the spirit of Syracuse University. The D.O. encouraged members of the campus community to nominate people who fit this description, and The D.O. selected the final eight nominees. This series explores their stories.

The Carnegie Library Reading Room is where Chris Forster goes to explore the world of literature. He loves the stacks, which are book storage areas in Carnegie that weren’t open to students and faculty at Syracuse University until 1965. There’s a gap between the shelving and the walkway, and you can look down over four floors.

“You sort of feel like you’re suspended in this world of books. It’s really, really weird, I love it over there,” he said.

With his round glasses, slightly tousled hair and button-up sweater, Forster is the textbook image of an English professor. Forster almost dedicated his career to computer science, but his passion for literature prevailed. Over his career and his last several years teaching literature at SU, Forster has established himself as a passionate academic who is constantly striving to learn new things — a quality his students said they value.

A self-professed nerd, Forster said he was captured by computers even before he became interested in literature. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute — a school that doesn’t even offer an English major — for one year to study computer science, but spent all of his time in the library reading Oscar Wilde.

When he left WPI, he left explicitly to become an English professor. But Forster said he knew he had to fully commit in order to justify everything he was leaving behind. What clinched the idea was a book he had read early in high school: “Notes from Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The fact that a work of literature could be afforded the same importance also given to philosophers was something Forster hadn’t realized before reading the book. It was the first book he really fell in love with.

“I was sold on this idea that literature was this deeply important thing. It wasn’t just interesting or fun, it could say something vital,” Forster said. “It was really that reading of Dostoyevsky that made literature seem worthy of all the time that I was going to put into it.”

Forster has a balance between analytical thinking, shaped by his experience with computer science and technology and his passion for literature. These attributes made him stand out to Michael Levenson, a William B. Christian professor of English at the University of Virginia as well as Forster’s former professor and dissertation adviser.

“He not only is a great analytical intelligence, but he’s also a very powerful and sympathetic imagination,” Levenson said. “He can think very abstractly and rigorously but can also use sensitivity and responsibility.”

Since he began teaching at SU in 2012, Forster has curated that balance in his curriculum as well. In addition to teaching 20th-century writing and literature, he tackles concepts like the influence of different media on how stories are told, like narratives in video games or short stories published on Twitter.

“I think it’s important for people to feel empowered to talk about these issues even when they don’t have the technical expertise,” Forster said.

He added that literature is so intertwined with history that to study literature is to also study the past. The English department as a whole takes social justice issues, as well as questions of identity and power, very seriously in the way it thinks about literature, Forster said.

For Guillar Kazemzadeh, a sophomore political science major, the most important thing Forster’s class taught her was the importance of inclusivity.

“He made an effort to include various topics, specifically the roles of gender and race, in our society and how as a community, we need to make a better effort to help make people feel included in discussion,” she said in an email.

Kazemzadeh added Forster opened her eyes to how diverse English and textual studies is, which is the reason she decided to declare an ETS minor.

Cait Córdova, the club’s president and a senior public relations and ETS dual major, has taken six classes with Forster.

“He’s so engaging and genuinely cares about whether or not you’re learning,” Córdova said.

She added that she would go to his office hours and stay an hour past the intended appointment time because Forster was so invested in the little things, making sure he was with students at every step of their learning process.

Although he isn’t a computer scientist now, Forster still remains passionate about “computer-nerdy stuff.” He works with document conversion software and is teaching himself new programming languages. He’s also an “intense podcast aficionado” and will be teaching about podcasts in one of his classes for the first time this coming week.

“He wants students to be as curious and willing to learn as he is,” Córdova said. “Professor Forster is probably one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Chris Forster’s role in the Literature Society was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.