Biographical Notes

I’ll keep this brief: I had a long and busy career.

I was fortunate from modest wartime beginnings to win scholarships to King’s College School , Wimbledon , and Queens ’ College, Cambridge . After three years’ school-teaching, which was invaluable experience, I returned to Cambridge and gained my PhD.

After a year as Assistant Lecturer at the University of Leeds , I moved in 1968 to University of Canterbury , New Zealand , as lecturer and then senior lecturer.

In 1975 I was fortunate again, appointed full professor at Victoria University of Wellington at age 35. At that time I had published on Fielding, Hardy and Butler , and given some successful conference papers, but the appointment was mainly in recognition of my good reputation as a lecturer. Through the rest of my career, my top priority continued to be high quality, innovative teaching, and careful and fair assessment of students’ work.

Unexpectedly soon I served a 3-year term as Chairman of the Department of English, a large and vigorous one, and not long after that two terms as Dean of the Faculty of Languages & Literature, which meant being part of the University’s senior management committee.

I returned to full-time teaching in the late 1980s, but by then was also committed to demanding work on New Zealand ’s schools’ English curriculum, as a member of the Universities’ Entrance Board, later as an appointee of the Minister of Education. I wrote a draft revised syllabus for the senior high school years that was very well received, and then chaired the larger revision of the whole school curriculum.

The University soon used me again, too, this time to oversee its increasing alliances. I was Director of Inter-Institutional Arrangements. The title I proposed first was Director of Institutional Relationships, Tertiary (or DIRT), but someone noticed.

I was working when possible on scholarly research and articles, writing reviews, editing, organizing conferences, and publishing work that linked university expertise with the needs of schools; I was Visiting Professor at New York University , Research Fellow at the Newberry Library, Chicago, and distinguished public lecturer at Williams College, Mass., but in these years I wrote nothing substantial. That began to come in the late 1980s, with the book on Katherine Mansfield, and then the major Oxford Companion.

Even that didn’t save me from other demands, and in 1999 I was appointed Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Academic), back in Senior Management for two contentious years.

By negotiating a part-time appointment, I at last gave myself time to write, and began to produce the books listed elsewhere, as well as developing a set of innovative and popular new courses that have helped build Victoria’s summer trimester.

Taking formal retirement at the beginning of 2006, I continue to do the academic things I most like - writing, teaching and running good courses. No committee meetings. My 100-level course “Literature & Visual Media” ended a great six-year run in February 2007, and my role in the remaining three courses is planned to diminish over the next three years or so. But “Journalism and Literature” (at 200 and Honours levels), and “Utopias, Imagined Worlds and Satiric Fantasies” are internationally unique, cutting edge, educationally valuable, and well liked by students. They make a good way to end.