Though she is a leading mind in the studies of gender and sexuality, English professor Heather Love, when asked about her other talents, replies, "I'm sort of a one-trick pony, I guess. This is my thing."
It is, in part, this quick wit that has earned Love respect and praise from her colleagues, higher-ups and students since she began teaching at the University last fall.
English Department Chairman David Wallace recalls that Love "was just utterly dazzling" when he interviewed her for her current position. "She's amazingly focused, funny and well informed."
College senior Lynn Huang, who has taken two classes with Love, echoed these sentiments and called Love "one of the funniest people I've ever known."
But it is not just her sense of humor that has impressed students and faculty across the University. Love's intelligence and enthusiasm -- not to mention the unique subject matter of her classes -- have also earned her many admirers.
"She's become extraordinarily popular in a very short space of time," Wallace says. "Every one of us has a sexuality ... but few of us choose to look at it with any real attention. It's great to have someone like Heather who actually has looked at gender and sexuality matters ... . She educates both the students and the faculty."
But while her classes have titles such as "Secrecy and Sexuality in the Modern Novel" and "Theories of Sexuality," students anticipating a class full of erotic fiction should look elsewhere, Love says.
"I think students are always surprised that I never really talk about sex itself. My classes are really squeaky clean because we're talking about sexuality as an aspect of culture and the construction of sexuality and representations of sexuality. It's very, very rare that we'll be reading any sort of explicit material, and I think students sometimes feel a little short-changed."
Love says that her classes focus on "marginal sexualities," adding that "the histories of gay and lesbian experiences are central to the class."
Her interest in studies of gender and sexuality stems in part from the fact that she is gay, Love says -- but it certainly does not stop there.
"I do feel like I have a special attachment to it for that reason. But I think I came to it as much through, say, literary studies or critical theory or cultural studies. You really need lots of different reasons to keep doing it ... so being gay wouldn't be enough reason to keep me doing it."
But despite her passion for the material, teaching about such sensitive issues can often be a challenge, Love says -- especially given the diverse makeup of her classes.
"It's a balancing act. A totally sanitized classroom where people are just saying what they think is right or polite to say is not a very productive pedagogical space, but there are clear lines for me. If something is just simply hatred or attack, that actually has no place in the classroom."
"I try to get people to feel safe to express their opinions, but also [know] that people aren't going to be expressing opinions that are directly denigrating their lives. I think for a lot of people who teach on issues of identity and inequality, that's a challenge you're always facing."
And Love's care in handling these topics is not lost on her students.
"She's just a great teacher overall because she treats the subject with such great sensitivity and such a great sense of humor, which I think is crucial to teaching a subject that's difficult to handle," Huang said.
Love said that one of her main goals in teaching is "to try to open up new ways of thinking about things that people didn't even think were problems ... . I think the curriculum is one place where people can try to think through these issues of social inequality."
And, for College junior Tom Zylkin, Love's class has done just that.
Zylkin, who enrolled in Love's "20th Century British Novel" class last fall, said he was so taken by her teaching that he decided to take her "Secrecy and Sexuality in the Modern Novel" class this semester.
Although Zylkin went into the class with "typical biases about that kind of topic," he says he's "definitely been enlightened" since then.
And even when she isn't teaching classes that cover sexuality directly, Love often manages to weave the topic into class discussions.
"Part of what I try to do is to get things like desire or the construction of sexual identities to work in a similar sort of way," Love says. "Even a book that's not about sex or sexuality or gay people or anything like that, you see how the sexuality and the construction of sexual identity is playing into a certain kind of representation."
But Love herself had little opportunity to study these issues when she attended Harvard. At that time, she says, classes on gender and sexuality were very rare.
"I was interested in this field, but there weren't classes about it, so I couldn't really pursue it exactly," she says. "I didn't even know what it was that I wanted to talk about, I just knew that I was interested in some of these issues."
But while classes focused on gender and sexuality were not offered when she was in school, by the time Love graduated from Harvard in 1991, she had gained a strong background in women's studies, which often incorporates studies on gender and sexuality.
Love went on to earn a doctorate in English from the University of Virginia and afterwards spent two years teaching at Harvard on a post-doctoral fellowship in the humanities.
It was during her time at Harvard that Love earned much praise as a teacher -- praise which has continued to be heaped upon her at Penn.
"She's a really good listener. I think that's what makes her classroom experience different," Zylkin said. "She really gets the idea that the classroom is a community."
"I talk about her every day to people, and I keep telling them to take her class," Huang added. "I think it should be a required course for all of humanity."
And Love's admirers can rest assured that she has no plans of leaving Penn anytime soon.
"It's a great job, and I'm so happy to have a gender studies job," she said. "The English Department is great and things have been going really well, so my plan is to stick around."
