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The Keble Review 2013
bout half the students Tony Phelan taught
in his time at Keble returned to College on
Saturday 27 July 2013 to celebrate his
retirement with him and his wife Liz Dowler.
It was an occasion to wonder at his youthfulness. Tony
was a Tutorial Fellow for fifteen years. He had been an
undergraduate and graduate student at Jesus College,
Cambridge, and spent most of his career in the German
Department at the University of Warwick. When the
College and the University were looking for a new
Germanist in 1998, most candidates were younger
than Tony, but the then Professor of German, who
knew him, assured other members of the appointing
committee that, in outlook and energy, Tony was like
someone in his twenties. And so it turned out.
Unusual among tutors these days, Tony covered a
very wide range. In addition to the period of German
literature in which he principally specialized (1750-
1848), he taught twentieth-century literature and
even, when there was a real need, the early modern
period. His major scholarly contribution is undoubtedly
his monograph
Reading Heinrich Heine
, published by
Cambridge University Press in 2007. Heine is one of
the most significant German poets of the nineteenth
century and often considered the last of the Romantic
poets. Tony’s work reads Heine in the light of his
twentieth-century reception and casts him as an
incipient modernist. Beyond his own period, Tony also
wrote about Rainer Maria Rilke, the Weimar Republic,
Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.
When he first took up his appointment as two-thirds
Tutorial Fellow at Keble and one-third Lecturer at
Trinity, he wished (he recently confessed) that the
relative balance had been different and that he had
been elected to a Tutorial Fellowship at Trinity. He
soon saw the light, however, and rapidly became
an important part of the fabric of Keble, seeing the
College as an academic community that required
nourishment even beyond German tutorials.
Tony participated unstintingly in the broader life of the
College. He embellished public rooms as a member of
the Art Committee, and the gardens as Garden Master.
A long-standing member of the Iona Community, he
supported the work of the Chapel and preached from
its pulpit. As Deputy Steward of the Senior Common
Room, he defended its interests and presided with
jovial grace. He took students to theatre, opera, and
galleries, was instrumental in setting up the Martin
Esslin Society, and himself performed in student drama.
For three years, he was a Dean of some aplomb. He
and the two Junior Deans made a dramatic entrance
before the assembled freshers, dressed entirely in
black. Since he lived in College at the time and had a
wonderful vantage point above the Warden’s Lodgings,
he was able to apprehend many an unsuspecting
miscreant, like the three besuited and intoxicated
undergraduates who, in the early hours, were
attempting to set up a stolen set of traffic lights in the
middle of the quad.
Tony was a humanizing and liberalizing presence in
College and the Modern Languages students and I
myself were the most immediate beneficiaries. For
many years, at our first meeting with the freshers in
October, which always coincided with National Poetry
Day, Tony would recite Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not
Taken’. In retirement, Tony will be tempted by roads
that are grassy and wanting wear, but he will not forget
the ones more travelled by.
Michael Hawcroft
Fellow and Tutor in French
Professor Tony Phelan’s
Retirement
a
