Ed Shevlin is hardly a typical academic.

He dropped out of high school and tended bar in the Rockaways in Queens, where he has lived his entire life.

Mr. Shevlin, 55, a husky man with a strong Queens accent, earned his high school equivalency diploma when he was 30 and became a New York City sanitation worker known for his study of the Irish language, which is often loosely called Gaelic in the United States. He would practice the language with older Irish immigrants living along his Rockaway route.

But he also worked tirelessly to get a bachelor’s degree and arranged his vacation weeks to fit in studies in Ireland.

He recently began a master’s degree program in Irish and Irish-American Studies at New York University, where one of his professors, Marion R. Casey, mentioned an old newspaper article about John Kilgallon, a native of Far Rockaway who sailed to a Dublin boarding school as a young man and wound up fighting in the 1916 Easter Rising rebellion against the British, which helped lead to Irish independence.