Biography
Karen was a sales representative at the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of the Dunder Mifflin paper and office-supply company. She originally worked at the company's branch in Stamford, Connecticut, but transferred to the Scranton branch after her boss, Josh Porter, left in order to take an upper-management job at Staples. She is now the Regional Manager of the Utica branch of Dunder Mifflin.
Karen's ethnicity is deliberately made ambiguous and turned into a sort of running joke. The Italian ancestry implied by her last name is confirmed in "The Merger." But prior to that in the same episode, Dwight suggests that she may be Filipino. Michael then states that she's very exotic looking and asks if her father was a GI. In addition, she has spoken a little French ("Grief Counseling") and Chinese (deleted scene from "Gay Witch Hunt"). Rashida Jones's real ethnicity is mixed as well: her father, Quincy Jones, is black, and her mother is Ashkenazi Jewish.
In her free time, Karen enjoys playing first person shooter PC games. Her Call of Duty screen name is "KarenTheJimSlayer". She prefers wearing pantsuits at the office rather than skirts. Like Jan Levenson, Karen is portrayed as an ambitious career woman — having gunned for a corporate vice president position and now serving as the regional manager of the Utica branch — though considerably more personable than Jan. Along with Pam Beesly, Karen is often objectified by several men in the Scranton Branch.
Read more about this topic: Karen Filippelli
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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