From Penny Whistle-Player to Professor

Playing the penny whistle in Ireland set Kathleen Tonry on a path that eventually led to UConn.

<p>Kathleen Tonry, assistant professor of English. Photo by Daniel Buttrey</p>
Kathleen Tonry, assistant professor of English and a specialist in medieval literature. Photo by Daniel Buttrey

Kathleen Tonry has discovered that you can never know precisely where your most esoteric interests might lead you.

Take, for example, the mix of her own passions for the penny whistle and books both very old and very new. Her route to an appointment in 2005 as an assistant professor of English and associate director of the Writing Center was helped along by these – and a herd of goats.

In 1992, she was a new graduate of Santa Clara University with a degree in English. The U.S. was in a recession and there weren’t many traditional jobs available. So she answered a university’s call seeking recent grads to teach English in the Czech Republic. There was little information about the post, other than that it would involve a summer at the University of Central Bohemia, and a subsequent teaching post lasting two years.

Tonry spent the summer teaching engineering faculty at the university, shadowing an experienced British teacher. But when fall came and her new assignment was to move deep into the countryside to teach 70 high school boys, she said no. “I only knew the Czech word for ice-cream,” she says.

Her ticket abroad was one-way, her teaching salary had been paltry, and her family did not have the funds to rescue her. So Tonry hitchhiked across Europe and eventually found herself in a hostel outside the rural town of Geesala, on Ireland’s west coast.

As an American, and especially as a Californian, she was something of a novelty to the local residents. “My one skill was playing the penny whistle,” she says. That passion made her friends, and eventually earned her a referral to a farmer who was away most of the year and needed someone to watch his small herd of goats. Soon, she was taking five goats up to a mile and half into the bog to graze every day, feeding them oats, and milking them herself.

“Goats have a reputation for being ornery, which I can tell you is true,” she says. “I would walk them out every day on individual rope leads, and by the half-mile mark I’d be hopelessly tangled and, sometimes, missing a goat.” The neighbors were amused but not impressed with her farming skills, she recalls.

“I decided to redefine my interest in the humanities,” Tonry says. So while the goats were grazing, she was studying a Norton anthology and a prep book for the Graduate Record Exam. Soon she had saved enough to return to the United States, where she signed on with Harper Collins in San Francisco. Her job? Calling authors to tell them that their books were going out of print and that they were entitled to 25 free books before the rest were destroyed.

Eager to really be part of the editing process, she earned a transfer to New York as an editorial assistant working on books such as How to Grow Giant Vegetables and Boy George’s autobiography, Take it Like a Man.

“I loved my job,” Tonry says. “It was intellectually interesting and exciting, but at the same time I knew that to excel, I needed to be dedicated to the commercial aspect of publishing.”

Her days reading with the goats told her that her heart was in a culture several centuries earlier. Soon, Tonry was at the University of Notre Dame earning her doctorate in medieval literature, with the ambition of becoming a college professor.

At Notre Dame, she discovered two academic footholds. The first brought her interest in books full circle, and she began research on England’s first printer, William Caxton. The second was working with undergraduates at the campus writing center.

In 2005, as a newly minted Ph.D., she was delighted to find her dream job at UConn – a tenure-track position split between the traditional duties of an assistant professor of English and the role of associate director of a new Writing Center.

“I like the flexibility of the position, and the ways it allows me to pursue medieval literature and work with student writers from across the curriculum,” she says.

She now supervises a Writing Center staff of 35 undergraduate and graduate tutors. It’s a job that has endless variety – students come in with lab reports, ethnographies, and public policy briefs.

Her research is focused on the idea of “common profit” as it informed England’s very early print culture. “The ideal of working for the common good as well as for individual profit circulates in the work of printers like William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde,” she says. “In many ways, the idealism evident in the transition from manuscript to print 500 years ago echoes our own hopes and ideals as we move from print to digital media forms.”

Tonry’s own book, The Common Profits of Early Print, 1475-1550, will be published in 2012 by Brepols, an international academic publisher specializing in scholarship about the Middle Ages.

Also forthcoming, in 2011 from the Ohio State University Press, is a collection of essays (co-edited with Shannon Gayk), Form and Reform, which considers the relationship of literary form and historical context throughout the 15th century.

And one day, there may even be a novel about the goat herding.