Stepping into Kate Marshall’s office is a bit like stepping into a one-room museum, with antique typewriters, artifacts of early cinema, and book-making tools among the pieces on her shelves.
“The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work,” she said. “There’s often an element of materiality — I’m interested in how texts are made and what media go into making them.”
This feature is part of a College of Arts & Letters story series called “Office Hours,” which provides a glimpse into the personal and professional lives of Arts & Letters faculty through their workspaces around campus. This installment highlights Marshall, the Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs College Professor in the Department of English, whose research and teaching focus on the interactions of media, technology, and genre in contemporary literature.
In this interview, Marshall discusses important pieces in her office that inspire her and are relevant to her writing, her roles as associate dean for research and strategic initiatives and director of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, and her personal life.
Marshall’s answers have been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Q: What do you want people to feel when they enter your office?
A: I want them to feel welcome and excited about research in the college.
The objects I keep around me represent what I’m really excited about in humanist work. I also have books related to the Franco Institute’s research theme, which this year is attention. For example, I have a book by one of the speakers of our symposium, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, over here. I also have some books in the office that are related to the future of the humanities, something that we talk and think about in the Institute.
I think that it is important to pair your intellectual projects with the administrative work you do. I’m writing a book about the novella and reading short fiction in the age of attention, so I have a lot of very short books on my bookshelf — the things that I’m trying to think about as I continue my own research.
Q: What are the stories behind your typewriters?
A: These three are all very special to me. This is not my entire typewriter collection, but these are three key examples. They all have stories — and I think they look good.
They’re from different eras. The black typewriter, the Underwood, is an early 20th-century typewriter, and they were made in the same factories that were manufacturing weapons for World War I. The way in which media technology and military technology have gone together, I think, is an interesting part of its story.
The seafoam-colored typewriter is called a portable Hermes, Hermes being the winged messenger. It’s heavy, but you could carry it around. I really like it for the literary connection. The portable Hermes is the typewriter fictionalized in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — the one he used to forge identities.
The red typewriter, which is called the Valentine, is made by the Italian company Olivetti, and it’s an icon of 20th-century design. The case and the red, molded plastic typewriter have a really important design history, too.
When I moved to South Bend in 2009, there was still an open typewriter repair shop on Mishawaka Avenue. It’s since closed, but it made me feel like this town was a good home for me.
Q: When you’re sitting here, stuck with one of your projects, where do you look to get your mind rolling again?
I always look to the bookshelf. There are more novellas on this shelf than I could possibly write about in a single book, and I love to rearrange and move through them.
There’s a stack of the books that have been published in the book series I edit with the organization Post45 in the past few years. The theme of this series is literature and culture after 1945 — not necessarily explicitly American, but in the wake of the American century as a larger political and economic formation.
My second book, Novels by Aliens, came out a few weeks after I started the position as director of the Institute, so when I finally got to hold that book in my hands, I had just started working here in this office. The thesis of the book is that in the 21st century, there’s a desire for ways of seeing the world that are nonhuman. This is motivated by environmental concerns and ideas about agency that go beyond what has traditionally been understood as human.
I look at different interdisciplinary ways that this desire manifests in contemporary fiction and at its literary history. This is largely a story about genre, and one that I’ve continued to explore as I write my new book about the novella.
I also have a pile of all the objects I’ve found mudlarking. Mudlarking is when you walk along a river, specifically the Thames River in London, and you look for objects that wash up from the water that had been deposited or lost for years, even hundreds of years. You learn how to understand the tides, and you have to learn how to identify the things you find. I’ve found some clay pipes from different eras. One of them is Victorian and has a cricket bat design on it. Another is from the 18th century, and one is even older, probably from the 16th or 17th century. Two other pieces I have here are a fragment of a medieval shoe buckle and a fossilized tooth of either an older form of livestock or even some kind of larger animal — some of these teeth have been identified as belonging to mammoths.
Q: Your office has so many items from the past — what’s your newest piece?
The most recent addition to the office would probably be a very kitschy figurine of the statue of Athena from Nashville, Tennessee. There’s a huge replica of the Parthenon and the statue of Athena in Nashville, so I picked that up when I was giving a lecture at the humanities center of Vanderbilt University last year.
That’s next to a tiny Adirondack chair, which is probably a little bit older but is maybe my most valued possession in the office. I teach in the summers at a place called the Bread Loaf School of English. Most of the students in the program are high school teachers, and I teach literature there. I live in Robert Frost’s farmhouse, and I experiment with different ways of teaching literature that I bring back to my classroom here, too.
When you are awarded a chair at Bread Loaf — I was named the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair in 2019 — you’re presented with a teeny-tiny Adirondack chair as a memento of that award. It lives here as a reminder of the institution and the other people across the country who also have this award.
Q: Do you have anything here from your students?
A: There are a few objects that have been made by my students over the years. That yellow and blue print is something made on the letterpress. It’s an excerpt that the student typed up from The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, which I taught in a graduate seminar. I also have this tiny work of book art that a student made.
The framed newspaper clippings were a gift from my first doctoral student. I started working with this student as her dissertation chair the year I came here, and she wrote a terrific dissertation about radio and modernism. And then when she left to take her job in New York, she left that with me as a memento of our time together.
It’s not everything, but keeping these objects in my Institute office helps me remember why we’re doing the work that we’re doing — supporting research, thinking about students, thinking about how we talk about the value of this work and really support it, both on campus and off. It’s nice to have some of those documents of students and ideas as a reminder for the why — why we do this work in the College.
Q: What serves as a good reminder in your office?
This image from an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which is the current working title for my book on the novella.
That picture is of the actor Burgess Meredith. In the show, his character is someone who’s a bookworm and feels like he doesn’t have any time to read. His home life doesn’t allow him to read, and neither does his job at a bank — his wife and supervisor get mad at him when he’s reading instead of working or doing anything else. So he’s beset with all of these problems with reading.
Then there’s a huge nuclear explosion or some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe, and he has locked himself in the bank vault to have time to read so no one can find him. He survives, and he comes out into a wasteland. There’s no one else in the world.
And then he finds the library, and this is the moment from which the title of the episode comes. He’s stacked up all the books in what order he’s going to read them in, and he says, “Books, books! Time enough at last!” And that’s exactly when he breaks his glasses.
That was the image that popped into my head when I got offered my job in the English department at Notre Dame in 2009. I wondered what was going to happen next, and I had so much joy, but I also knew that it would be something I shouldn’t take for granted.
Q: What’s changed since you moved to this office?
English professors are fairly solitary. You teach, you work with students in classrooms, and you work with students in your office, and then you occasionally come together as a department or work on a committee. The rest of the time you are writing and reading alone.
But when I started working in this institute, everything about my life was both enriched by and dependent on all of the amazing people who work here. I spend five days a week in this office, and it’s a very alive, very permeable space. We all fit in a pretty tight space where we work with undergraduates, we work with graduate students, we occasionally meet members of the community, we work with faculty. So we have a few different teams: people who work on faculty projects, a team that works on the student projects, a really amazing outreach and events team that’s helping us do a lot more of our public-facing work as well as shepherd our fellowship programs. It’s a very collaborative workplace.
It’s really extraordinary to be at a university that is investing in the humanities and the liberal arts. Humanities, arts, and social science research are central to Notre Dame’s mission not only for faculty, but also for graduates and undergraduates. That is absolutely galvanizing, but none of it is possible without an extraordinary group of people to make it happen — and the people in the Franco Institute are just really making it happen.
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on February 25, 2026.