Rate My Professor Chris Ackerley

Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley served in the Department of English and Linguistics, School of Arts, Humanities Division, at the University of Otago for 39 years from 1976 until his retirement in 2015. He holds an MA from the University of Canterbury and a PhD from the University of Toronto, completed in 1978. Ackerley advanced to Professor of English, former Head of Department, and delivered his inaugural professorial lecture in 2008 on 'The Art of Annotation.' His career emphasized teaching across a wide range of papers with enthusiasm for literature, fostering student achievements while contributing to a collegial academic environment.

Ackerley's field is Modernism, specializing in annotation with expertise in Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett, alongside interests in Nabokov, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, J.G. Farrell, Borges, and Roa Bastos. Major publications include The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (2004, with S.E. Gontarski), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt (2010), Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (2010), and the edited Faber edition of Beckett's Watt (2009). He developed the Malcolm Lowry Project's hypertextual companion to Under the Volcano and pursued projects such as annotating Lowry's In Ballast to the White Sea, the 1940 Volcano, and Swinging the Maelstrom for the Editing Modernism in Canada initiative; a study of Samuel Beckett and science; and a Marsden-funded exploration of modernist aesthetics rooted in medieval traditions. Ackerley advises editorial boards including Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Historicising Modernism, Modernism and Christianity, Otago French Notes, and the Ionesco-Beckett Research Centre. His annotations and companions have profoundly impacted scholarship on modernist literature by elucidating obscure references and intertextual complexities.