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The untimely passing of Doreen G. Fernandez, longtime Professor of English and Chair of Communications at the Ateneo de Manila University, last year while visiting New York City, is a profound loss not only to Philippine academia but also to international professional circles where she was highly respected as a scholar and writer. She is one of the most prolific and competent academics that the Philippines has produced, who was not only respected but loved by her peers and students and people who knew her.
Summarizing her vast contributions to the academic literature is a daunting task. Her output was simply astounding, not just in quantity but also in the range of expertise across disciplines or subfields that she straddled with amazing ease-English, literature, language, communications, history, education, journalism, religion, popular culture, and Philippine food culture. She was the embodiment of "Philippine studies" in terms of both subject matter and methodological approach. In fact, she was editing the prestigious Ateneo de Manila journal, Philippine Studies, and was regularly contributing to the Philippine Journal of Education at the time of her death. The immensity of her impact on Philippine scholarship will be hard to match. She had an incredible array of academic and human skills, be they teaching, lecturing, researching, editing, consulting, advising, organizing, judging contests on culture and the arts, writing a...