{"id":16453,"date":"2010-07-13T08:20:23","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T12:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=16453"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:37:11","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:37:11","slug":"from-penny-whistle-player-to-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/07\/from-penny-whistle-player-to-professor\/","title":{"rendered":"From Penny Whistle-Player to Professor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Kathleen<\/a>
Kathleen Tonry, assistant professor of English and a specialist in medieval literature. Photo by Daniel Buttrey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kathleen Tonry has discovered that you can never know precisely where your most esoteric interests might lead you.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 and a herd of goats.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t many traditional jobs available. So she answered a university\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI only knew the Czech word for ice-cream,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s west coast.<\/p>\n

As an American, and especially as a Californian, she was something of a novelty to the local residents. \u201cMy one skill was playing the penny whistle,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoats have a reputation for being ornery, which I can tell you is true,\u201d she says. \u201cI would walk them out every day on individual rope leads, and by the half-mile mark I\u2019d be hopelessly tangled and, sometimes, missing a goat.\u201d The neighbors were amused but not impressed with her farming skills, she recalls.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided to redefine my interest in the humanities,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and Boy George\u2019s autobiography, Take it Like a Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved my job,\u201d Tonry says. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At Notre Dame, she discovered two academic footholds. The first brought her interest in books full circle, and she began research on England\u2019s first printer, William Caxton. The second was working with undergraduates at the campus writing center.<\/p>\n

In 2005, as a newly minted Ph.D., she was delighted to find her dream job at UConn \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She now supervises a Writing Center staff of 35 undergraduate and graduate tutors. It\u2019s a job that has endless variety \u2013 students come in with lab reports, ethnographies, and public policy briefs.<\/p>\n

Her research is focused on the idea of \u201ccommon profit\u201d as it informed England\u2019s very early print culture. \u201cThe 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,\u201d she says. \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tonry\u2019s own book, The Common Profits of Early Print, 1475-1550<\/em>, will be published in 2012 by Brepols, an international academic publisher specializing in scholarship about the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

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

And one day, there may even be a novel about the goat herding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing the penny whistle in Ireland set Kathleen Tonry on a path that eventually led to UConn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-16453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 07:14:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16453"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36583,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453\/revisions\/36583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16453"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=16453"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}