"Definitely tell everybody to go to the Boston Common on Oct. 29 for the anti-war demonstration," urges Professor Carol Flynn as the Daily's interview with her comes to a close. "That's my public service announcement," she adds with a laugh.
Public service announcements are part of the bill with Flynn, an English and American Studies professor dedicated to political activism.
Flynn's path to her dual professorship has been a winding one. Armed with a "considerable" interest in literature, Flynn received a bachelor's degree in English as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. Fascinated by American literature, she next attended Brown University, where she pursued a master's degree in American Civilizations.
In an added twist, the 17th-century work Flynn studied while obtaining her master's had many English sources. She realized "how little [she] knew about English literature," so she moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in English.
It was, as Flynn says, "a funny return to the sources that constitute American literature." It was also at this time that her real interest in politics, anti-war, and feminism took hold.
Flynn wrote her dissertation on Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa," a 2,000-page story of a woman who was raped. It is, Flynn says, "an interrogation of all of the cultural artifacts of the 18th century: capitalism, slavery, the role of women, and the bourgeois structure."
"I guess I thought in the early 1970s that I would change the world through 18th-century work," Flynn says. "We thought if we could figure out what people were thinking then, we could understand where we were right now."
After completing her dissertation at Berkeley, Flynn moved to London in 1974 when her then-husband got a job offer there. "In 1974, the job market was so bad it wasn't a sacrifice to leave," she said.
While in London she spent a great deal of her time writing, researching, and exploring the city. "I wrote a book on Samuel Richardson," she said. "I spent a lot of time at British museums; I did a lot of cultural research I wouldn't have been able to do at Berkeley."
While in London, Flynn also became involved with the Women's Research and Resources Centre, "a group of women both academic and nonacademic coming together to write using feminist text," Flynn says. "We were trying to make [women's] voices heard."
"It was really the first time I had a hands-on connection to anything with writing, politics, culture," she said.
Flynn began her teaching career at New York University (NYU) in 1979. She taught there for six years and was awarded tenure. "I loved it," she said. "It was my first job. It's so hard to compare, because when I started, there were almost no women teaching."
Flynn was able to obtain her position in part because of her sex: "That's certainly one reason that I am for affirmative action," she says.
"I loved the students at NYU," she said. "A lot of them were first-generation students. They were very open and excited." Flynn appreciated the enthusiasm she felt from the students at NYU, not only for the material she taught, but also for female professors in general.
"The students embraced it," she says. "They were very excited to have women teachers. The response was very positive."
Not everyone embraced Flynn and her colleagues, however. "There was a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle antagonism between entering women and older professors, all of whom were men," Flynn says.
In addition, there was the challenge of figuring out where to fit in a man's world: "Were we supposed to be little men?" Flynn asks. "I had one woman teacher the entire time I was in grad school. I had none as an undergrad. It was difficult to find your own style."
Flynn followed her family to Boston after another job move for her then-husband. She continued to commute to NYU for a year, but found doing so too taxing on her two children. She accepted a position at Tufts and began her now-long career as a professor here.
Flynn noticed a difference in teaching style between NYU and Tufts. At NYU, "they had very strict ideas of what you were supposed to teach," she said. "Right away at Tufts, it was clear you could really determine what interested you. You could really develop courses that are not necessarily coming out of your resume."
Flynn cites this freedom as the backbone of her development of courses on immigration narratives and girls' books.
All the same, she does miss New York. "There is something really important about being urban," she says. "It has something to do with the way people walk through urban places - spending hours walking all over the place instead of claiming the territory."
Despite her appreciation of the urban, Flynn also has a love of the rural: every summer, she and husband David Tarbet travel across the pond to their cottage in Kirkcudbright, a tiny fishing village on the southwest border of Scotland. "That's entirely different," Flynn says. "When we go there, we're always walking; we have no TV. We sit by the fire and we write."
The writing Flynn has done extends beyond the bounds of the fireside spot in the cottage. She has written numerous critical works in her field but admits to writing just as much fiction, which remains, for the most part, unpublished. Her one published novel, "Washed in the Blood," is a murder mystery set in 1938 Los Angeles.
Flynn has just finished a memoir of her family, "The Animals."
"It's a memoir based on all the animals from newts to salamanders to cats and dogs in our family," she says. "It's telling the story of my life and my family's life, but very much through the animals. That's a really funny bridge between fiction and nonfiction."
This dual love infiltrates the courses Flynn teaches. In "Writing Lives," both critical analysis and creative writing play a large role in the coursework: "I think the courses I most enjoy have to do with both literary and critical analysis, but also have a creative component," Flynn says.
Flynn finds the current generation to be more creatively inclined than their recent predecessors. "There were times in the 1990s when I felt like things got really closed down," she says. "There was so much interest in making a lot of money."
"There is an interesting openness in students now that has been lacking for a while," Flynn says. "It seems like they are just full of real interest and curiosity."
Flynn's latest addition to her varied interests is grandchildren. She and Tarbet have four children altogether ("We're like a Brady Bunch," she says), as well as five grandchildren, all girls, between the ages of two and six.
"We play a lot of princess games, and I am always trying to get them to be magicians," she says with a laugh. "But they resist me and want pink."
With Flynn as a role model, resistance is futile: they'll be magicians in no time.
