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Melissa Girard thought she was going to be a lawyer when she started as an undergrad at Duquesne in the ’90s.

But one professor changed her mind.

Linda Kinnahan showed Girard, now an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland, that an academic life was possible.

“She was the reason I became an English major,” she said. “She always took my ideas really seriously and she got to know me. She had a really special way of making academic study feel personally relevant and meaningful to my life.”

Kinnahan retired from her 34-year Duquesne career this summer. She served as a professor in the English department, co-founded the women’s and gender studies program and helped to transform the English curriculum.

When she started at Duquesne, she said she was the only female faculty member in the department.

“One of the really wonderful things about coming to Duquesne was that there was a lot of opportunity to help build the English program,” she said.

Though it isn’t her only academic focus, feminist and women’s studies are a big part of her teaching and personal scholarship.

“There was no presence of any sort of women courses focusing on women, but I have to say they really supported me and then other people in the department that were hired shortly thereafter,” she said. “By the mid ’90s, there were four women in the department, and we all had interest in diversifying the curriculum.”

Her academic expertise centers largely on 20th and 21st century American and British poetry, with a particular emphasis on female poets and how gender is expressed at different points of history.

For her, poetry is not just the poet’s personal expression, but it often makes sharp cultural criticism.

“I just kept getting drawn into the kinds of questions that I felt like poetry was asking about the modern world and the way in which the 20th century changed so rapidly,” she said. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way in which those changes are both absorbed by poetry of the century, but also the way in which the poetry makes arguments about the modern world.”

Currently, she is co-writing a book which will focus on the poet Mina Loy’s travels and relation to different artistic movements in the 20th century. The book is in collaboration with Susan Rosenbaum and Suzanne Churchill. It is a print companion to a scholarly website they developed called Mina Loy Navigating the Avant Garde.

On Oct. 18, Kinnahan was honored at an online ceremony emphasizing her scholarly work in light of her retirement. She has written three other books and edited a collection of essays.

Laura Engel, professor and English department chair, said students sought out Kinnahan’s expertise, often taking multiple classes with her.

“For students, it was really exciting to be able to combine different ways of thinking about things and different parts of their brain to be creative and critical at the same time,” Engel said.

What keeps Kinnahan interested in academics is the social condition of women and how writing communicates beyond the denotative meaning of words.

“The way language operates is one of the most interesting things we experience as human beings,” she said. “A lot of the poets that I write about, what interests me is how are they positioned in relation to this particular moment for women in a particular place?”

Kinnahan found her place in the scholarly niche during her Ph.D. at Notre Dame University. She studied art and English in her undergrad at James Madison University, later attending the same institute for her masters in English.

Auditing one of Kinnahan’s courses was a main motivation for Girard to pursue graduate school.

Girard fondly reminisced on an end of semester celebration at Kinnahan’s home, where she shared books and art, as a beautiful glimpse into a scholarly life.

“The way that she opened her home and sort of opened her life to us, that was what really helped me see the kind of life I could have if I went on to study poetry and become a professor like her,” she said. “She also really helped me see how this was a career field that I could be part of.”

Engel echoed the same sentiment. She said Kinnahan is a masterful cook and welcoming host, noting fresh bread and coffee cake she’d made.

“I went to visit Vanessa Bell’s [Virginia Woolf’s sister] house. It totally reminded me of Linda… this explosion of creativity…Linda’s house is like that,” she said. “There’s a sense of walking into a world. Plus the fact that Linda is always serving you incredible food, is one of these really rare and wonderful experiences.”

Retirement is the medium for Kinnahan to read, write and focus more energy on her visual art. Lately, she’s been in the practice of spending two days a week traveling to and painting a new part of Pittsburgh.

“They’re small paintings…but that’s been a really fun way to get back into it,” she said.

She works mostly in watercolor, but has a background in drawing and oil painting as well. In both her visual art and creative writing she likes to start with small things.

“I’d rather write about the lemon cut open on the table than sour relationships,” she said.