Merry Pawlowski from CSU Bakersfield became Executive Director of the California State University Emeritus and Retired Faculty and Staff Association on July 1, 2022 replacing Harold Goldwhite from CSU Los Angeles who retired from the post of Executive Director after serving for six years.

 

Dr. Pawlowski has provided the following biographical information:

 

I arrived in Bakersfield as an assistant professor in the English department after completing my PhD at Tulane University, New Orleans, in 1990.  I taught a wide variety of courses from lower division to graduate level and proposed a number of new courses to further broaden our curriculum..  After two terms as department chair, i took early retirement and entered the FERP program in 2005, where, teaching a reduced load, I enjoyed the freedom to focus intently on course design and delivery.   Upon full retirement in 2010, I was awarded Emeritus status and took a hiatus from teaching until the department called me back four years ago to fill in gaps left by faculty retirements and deaths.  I thoroughly enjoyed my return to the classroom, but as the department was finally able to hire new faculty this year, I taught my last class this past spring. 

 

I’ve remained very active in scholarship throughout the years following my retirement, my earlier work on Virginia Woolf and her writings against fascism led me to embrace the work of Joseph Conrad, particularly his African fictions and nonfictions, in the light of his exposure of imperialism, autocracy, and colonialism.   The result of my research on Conrad is my forthcoming monograph entitled Joseph Conrad and Material Culture:  From the Rise of the Commodity Transcendent to the Scramble for Africa to be published at the end of this calendar year in the Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives series published by Marie Curie Sklodovska University Press/Columbia University Press with Wieslaw Krajka as General Editor.

I very much look forward to the new challenge that serving as Executive Director of CSU-ERFSA offers me and to working with the members of the Executive Committee and all other committees, with our extremely proficient Office Manager, and with each one of our affiliate campuses.  I will be reaching out personally to each affiliate campus in the coming months, I plan to travel to selected campuses to meet with members directly, and I encourage all affiliate members to contact me with any questions or concerns.  I value input from our affiliates on how to make our organization as strong and as responsive to members’ needs as possible.