Kathleen Torrens, professor of communications studies, joined URI in 2002. In 2008, Kathleen began as a mentor and part of the Steering Committee for Faculty Fellows for Online Teaching. She continued her work towards improving the university’s online program as Co-Chair of the Online Learning Task Force, then as Coordinator for the Office of Online and Distance Learning from 2010-2012. In 2013, Kathleen joined the Office of Online Teaching and Learning as Assistant Director. As such, Kathleen continues to run the Online Teaching Fellows Program, an asynchronous online program that aims to provide faculty with the information and tools needed to develop a successful online course by teaching best practices in online pedagogy. In 2011, Kathleen, along with Jose A. Amador published Taking Your Course Online: An Interdisciplinary Journey, focusing on online pedagogy and the transformation from face-to-face courses to online.

What was your path to URI like?
Naturally, it’s not a straight line. I got my PhD at the University of Minnesota, and my first job was in Ohio at one of the regional campuses of Kent State. I didn’t like Ohio very much, so I got a job out in Fresno, California. I stayed there for a couple years and, believe it or not, I moved back to Ohio, where I met my partner, and we left Ohio and came to New England. She had a job at UMass Dartmouth, and I got a job at Northeastern. We met someone from URI, Vince Petronio, and he suggested that I talk to the grad program director. So I did, and I got on for one grad class in 2003. There was an opening for a visiting assistant professor the next spring, which I interviewed for. I got that so I was an interim or a visiting professor for a year, and then they interviewed for a tenure track assistant professor, and I applied for that and got the job. So, I’ve been here ever since. That’s one of the things that I’m working with my capstone students on, is that you’re not going to jump into your perfect job right on June 1. It just doesn’t happen, and you have to be willing to be flexible and to be nimble and go where the doors open. 

What led you to your first research and how you started into that?
When I was figuring out how to finish college, 15 years after I graduated from high school, I looked at the catalog of the University of Colorado, which is where I was living at the time, to find the degree that I could get in the shortest amount of time, and that was communication studies. Once I was there, I thought, “This is great because it’s so broad, right? I can do anything, right?” So then when I was about to graduate, one of my professors said to me, “you should think about going to grad school, because you have what it takes.” And I thought, “Well, that’d be great, because then I don’t have to go look for a job.” So I got into the PhD program, and I realized then that I can’t do everything, that I had to specialize in something. And so I specialized in rhetoric, which is kind of the broadest thing that I could figure out, and also what kind of turned me on the most because it’s about how people make meaning, whether it’s on a personal level or more interesting to me is on a social level or a cultural level. And so I kept looking at the rhetoric of organizations and that kind of thing when I went to Minnesota. I studied with Carlin Campbell, who was one of the premier scholars in the field. She’s a feminist scholar, and she taught this class in feminist rhetoric that just kind of got me interested in the history of rhetoric and about social movements, in particular around women’s movements. I did a paper for her class on the dress reform movement, which started around 1856. I decided that I would do my dissertation on that subject. I found a newspaper that had been published from 1856 to 1864 by this woman from Middletown, New York, and I got all of the copies of the paper and started doing analysis on the kinds of strategies that she and the people who wrote for her would use to convince people that the way that they were dressing in the 1850s and 1860s was really terrible for women. At the time, there were corsets and petticoats that weighed 30 pounds, and it just started to make sense to me that the way that we dress has meaning beyond just we’re covering our bodies, right? So it sparked an interest in the history of fashion, but also how, even today, the kind of clothes that are considered to be high fashion are unwearable for people like you and me. So that was the foundation of my first area of research.

What is something that you would like your students to know, and what are your teaching goals?
When I started teaching, I was all about content. You know, “let’s learn these different kinds of speeches and how to give them, what are the parts of the speeches,” and blah, blah, blah. And then I started teaching rhetorical theory, and it was like, “Well, you have to know what Aristotle had.” I still think that the history of rhetoric is important. But over the last 10 years, and certainly since Covid, I’m less focused on content and more on ideas and confidence and actually being able to communicate a point of view. It seems like students today are very hesitant to say what they believe in. They don’t want to offend anyone. I mean, I remember being risk averse when I was their age, too, so it’s not like I blame them or anything. But in today’s world, we have to be able to talk about what we disagree about and not just keep it under the table. 

Here’s the other thing I would say to my students. Be curious. It’s very few kids in the room that will actually give me an answer, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re not curious. People used to talk about what they see as important, you know? And it’s really hard to get that kind of a conversation going these days.

If you were to tell your younger self something as one of your students, what is something that you would want them to know?
I just think that to my younger self, I think I would say, be more ballsy. I think that a lot of people would think that I was pretty brave as a kid, as a young person, gallivanting around the country the way that I did. But I would say that to the kids today too, don’t be so afraid of change and taking a step and making a mistake, right? Because that’s where you learn. And if you learn to communicate with people on any kind of a subject, the world is going to be a better place.