Gillian Paku received her PhD from Harvard University and began teaching at SUNY Geneseo in 2008. She teaches courses primarily in 18th-century literature and literary disability studies, and has published articles for Oxford University Press Handbooks Online and Eighteenth-Century Life. She received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2013, the 2023 Academic Affairs award for Outstanding Commitment to Learning, the 2021 Student Association Professor Recognition award, the 2012-2013 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Prize, and a Folger Institute / American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship in 2008.
Paku co-coordinates Geneseo’s First-Year Critical Writing and Thinking Program, INTD 105, and chairs the working group on an antiracist writing curriculum. She is the director of the Geneseo Writing Learning Center as well as the faculty sponsor for Geneseo’s chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society.
Classes
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ENGL 367: Lit: 18th Century Innovations
A study of selected Anglophone literary texts written between 1660 and 1900 focusing on the dynamic relationship between individual works and the broader culture from which they emerge. The course emphasizes historical, political and social events through which this literature was produced; the development of genres and poetics over time; and important changes in language. Representative offerings include: Poetry of the Augustan Age; Victorian Comedy; Literature of 19th Century Social Reform; Napoleon in British Literature; Antebellum Literature; Silver Fork Fiction; Virtual Thoreau; Transatlantic Romantic Prose.
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INTD 106: Conventions of College Writing
This asynchronous self-directed course introduces first-year students to the principles of standard English in a format that allows them to proceed at their own pace through the material and to understand themselves as active participants in their own learning. The course's content describes directly the key rhetorical and academic concepts that shape successful college writing. This course includes information and suggestions about online learning, and contextualizes effective writing skills as foundational to a public liberal arts education.
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INTD 306: Writing Learning Ctr Training
Advanced study of the practice and politics of writing and composition, and of tutoring approaches to promote student-centered learning. Prerequisite: permission of instructor; participants have been hired as incoming WLC tutors. S/U grading Credits: 1(0-2). Offered every fall semester.