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PERIPATETIC
OBSERVER
SUNY-
GENESEO
DEPARTMENT
OF ENGLISH
VOLUME 9
WINTER
2009
Sincerely, finkelst@geneseo.edu
of New Zealand universities. According legally and politically, and how it affects
Meet Professor Gillian Paku to Paku, this gave me the fairly unusual our perception of canonized literature
idea (for New Zealand) of looking to the and self-conscious authorship. She is
This year Gillian Paku joins the Eng- United States for graduate school--and also about to join with another scholar in
lish department as an Assistant Professor these same faculty members prepared attempting to organize some of the
specializing in Eighteenth-Century British her for the American academic rite-of- eighteenth-century material on Google
literature. passage known as the Graduate Record books, which she hopes to incorporate
Paku grew up in a small town in Examinations. regularly into classroom work.
Paku received her Ph.D. from Har-
Professor Paku will be responsible
vard University, where she attended on a for teaching ENGL313, Eighteenth-
Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship. While Century British Literature, among other
in Cambridge, she kept very busy. I offerings in her speciality. In the spring,
split my time between a dissertation on I'm teaching Samuel Johnson as my con-
the way anonymity is a paradoxical but tribution to his tercentenary celebra-
deliberate strategy for famous tions, she says. Much of the pleasure
eighteenth-century British writers to of teaching the eighteenth century comes
make a name for themselves, a lot of from meeting head-on the perception
teaching (mainly in the 18th-century and that the texts are old-fashioned in their
British survey courses), involvement in morality and coldly rational, and helping
English graduate student and interna- students to see instead that much of what
tional student affairs, and being at home seems very modern or post-modern to us
with the three children I had in grad was present even as authors first thought
Gillian Paku school, she reports. of themselves as professionals, or as
Dr. Paku s research and publication novels and periodicals first became
New Zealand and has undergraduate continues her work on authorial anonym- widely recognized--and not at all self-
degrees in both German and English ity. This autumn she participated in a evident--genres.
literatures from the University of Otago semester-long seminar at Washington
in Dunedin. While an undergraduate, D.C.s Folger Shakespeare Library. The
she noticed the growing presence of seminar, titled Anonymity, explored the
American professors among the faculty ways in which anonymity has developed
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