Rate My Professor Paul Tankard

Associate Professor Paul Tankard serves in the Department of English and Linguistics within the University of Otago's Division of Humanities. He earned his BA, Graduate Diploma of Education, MA with First Class Honours, and PhD from Monash University, with his doctoral research centered on Samuel Johnson, reading, and everyday life. Beginning his academic career as a high school English teacher at Mount Evelyn Christian School from 1982 to 1991, he later held various tutoring and lecturing positions at Monash University while working in libraries and providing creative writing courses. In 2003, he joined the University of Otago as a Lecturer in English, advancing to Senior Lecturer in 2008 and Senior Lecturer (beyond the bar) in 2014.

Tankard's primary research interests encompass the eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, alongside C.S. Lewis, the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, fantasy literature, paratextuality, composition, and the essay form. He edited the volume Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell (Yale University Press, 2014), which earned him the Bibliographical Society of America's William L. Mitchell Prize for Bibliography or Documentary Work on Early British Periodicals or Newspapers in 2018. Other notable publications include Samuel Johnson's "Designs": A Facsimile of the Manuscript, with a New Transcription and an Introductory Essay (The Johnsonians, 2008) and numerous articles in journals such as The Age of Johnson, Eighteenth-Century Life, Notes and Queries, and the Times Literary Supplement. His detective work uncovered a transcript of an unaired 1962 television interview with C.S. Lewis and previously unknown 1968 correspondence between J.R.R. Tolkien and illustrator Mary Fairburn praising her unpublished Lord of the Rings illustrations. Tankard has received the Frederick A. and Marion S. Pottle Fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2006), a Short-term Research Fellowship at the C.S. Lewis Study Centre, the Kilns, Oxford (2015), and several University of Otago Humanities Research Grants. He teaches courses including Fantasy and the Imagination, composition, creative non-fiction, and feature writing, and engages publicly through newspaper contributions and media expertise on literature and literacy.