Loyola University Chicago

Department of English

Department Profile

Overview

The Department of English at Loyola University Chicago has 27 full-time, tenure-track faculty; 17 full-time writing faculty; and a limited number of part-time lecturers, graduate assistants and fellows.

The department is among the largest in Loyola's College of Arts and Sciences and teaches 3,000 students in roughly 200 sections each term on the Lake Shore Campus, Water Tower Campus, and the John Felice Rome Center.

There are about 400 students in the major; about one in seven students opt for the Creative Writing Concentration.

The department's graduate programs, in which about 70 students are enrolled, offer both the MA and the PhD degrees.

Textual Studies

Building on our strength in textual scholarship, the department offers an interdisciplinary program in Textual Studies, spearheaded by the distinguished scholar Paul Eggert, Martin J. Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies. Scholarship in this field investigates original documents, whether manuscript, print, or electronic, and studies the processes of composition, revision, editing, printing, production, distribution, and reception. Interdisciplinary by its very nature, Textual Studies is central to all periods of literary criticism, as well as to disciplines such as philosophy, history, music, theology, and media studies. Today it serves as the foundation of digital humanities—the study of digital texts and media and the application of computing to humanities research. Growing out of the department's initiative, a new multidisciplinary Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities has been established within the College of Arts and Sciences.

Members of the faculty serve on the editorial boards of prominent academic journals and have founded or contribute to various online archives and databases such as Woolf Online. Various faculty members hold offices in national, regional or local scholarly organizations, as well as administrative positions within the university.

Governance

The department is governed by bylaws (which include guidelines for promotion and tenure) and is administered by the chairperson, and by directors of the graduate, undergraduate and writing programs (the department "officers").

The Department Council, made up of seven elected members of the faculty who are not department officers, advises the chairperson.

Standing committees advise the department on a variety of issues: they include committees on the writing programs, on the undergraduate programs and on the graduate programs.

Tenure-Track Faculty

Most tenured or tenurable faculty hold appointments to the graduate faculty of the university. All graduate faculty are eligible to teach graduate courses on an average of once every three semesters. Full members of the graduate faculty may also be called upon to direct dissertations.

Tenured and tenurable faculty are expected to engage in work leading to publication, either scholarly or creative. Each year several members of the department compete successfully for paid semester leaves to pursue research or to improve their teaching, and others secure summer stipends to support their scholarship. In addition, the department has access to endowment funds for faculty development.