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
-
ENGL 467: Lit: Fictional Letters
A course focused on a narrowly-defined topic, theme, issue, question, approach, scholarly debate, movement, or group of authors in 1700-1900 literature. In addition to helping students to acquire in-depth understanding of the literature, the course stresses the ability to "join the conversation" that is always ongoing among critics and scholars regarding texts, authors, and topics by engaging with secondary sources.
-
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.
-
WRTG 105: Wrtg: Disability Studies
Writing Seminar lays the foundation for students to participate insightfully in both written and oral academic conversations. The course focuses on three modes of written and oral communication: communication as an ongoing persuasive dialogue with multiple audiences, communication with a reflective self, and communication with a dynamic evolving text. The course also introduces elements of information literacy and critical thinking needed to develop and evaluate academic conversation. Writing Seminar is typically taken by new students in their first two semesters, often as the introduction to general education, to our library, and to academic support services as sites of collaboration rather than remediation. As many new students' only seminar-style class, Writing Seminar can help lay the foundations of not only academic but also social success.