Focus on Faculty: Getting to the Source of the Story With Ben Leeming

“Reframing the dissertation from an academic exercise into terms of story, narrative, and audience was so helpful to me,” Leeming says. That shift informs how he structures his classes at Rivers, where he is also the John B. Jarzavek Teaching Chair. “My classes always begin with some kind of hook to make the student sit up and think,” he says.

Leeming’s first role at Rivers was filling in for Jack Jarzavek, teaching the senior art history elective while Jarzavek was on a one-year sabbatical in 1996. The close-knit and supportive environment at Rivers was a clear fit from the start, and Leeming ended up staying on full time. His undergraduate degree is in art history, and after teaching for a few years, he was motivated to pursue a master’s in history at Harvard in the evenings and on weekends, during which time, he says, he made an important discovery. 

“I learned that I loved research, and, in particular, getting into special collections, handling with my own two hands the materials that historians make history from,” he says.

A class on Mesoamerican civilization introduced him to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, which quickly became his primary research interest. Later, Leeming took his family to Mexico while he completed an intensive program to expand his study of the language and culture.

 

The experience cemented his desire to pursue a Ph.D.; he graduated from SUNY Albany in 2017 with a Ph.D. in historical anthropology, or ethnohistory, the study of Indigenous people from the past. He continues to speak about and publish his research. Leeming’s second book, The Americas' First Sermons: The Nahuatl Sermons of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a translation of early sermons written in Nahuatl, will be released in early 2026 by the University of Utah Press.

That scholarly work has developed in tandem with Leeming's work as a teacher, which he considers his primary calling. In recent years, he has shared his love for archives and special collections with students through the senior-level honors history seminar, “Native New England: Recovering Lost Voices in the Archive,” a semester-long course that brings much-needed attention to the presence of Black and Indigenous people in local history. Last spring, the seminar’s 10 students worked in partnership with the Framingham History Center, utilizing the archives for research and creating a publicly accessible history project that they presented to the community on the final day of class. Leeming also launched Rivers’ first archives internship with the center in the summer of 2025, and is eager to continue the momentum.

Says Leeming, “I would love to find more ways to bring students into situations where they are confronting in person—and ideally with their own hands—the sources that have built history.”