Department Profile
Overview
The Department of English at Loyola University Chicago has 24 full-time, tenure-track faculty; 10 full-time writing faculty; and a fluctuating number of part-time lecturers and 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 M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees.
Members of the faculty edit the award-winning Website Romantic Circles and serve on the editorial boards of prominent academic journals. Various faculty members hold offices in national, regional or local scholarly organizations, as well as administrative positions within the university.
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.
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.
The Department of English at the Lake Shore Campus is housed in the Crown Center for the Humanities, situated on Lake Michigan.
At the Water Tower Campus, the department is on the ninth floor of Lewis Towers overlooking the historic Water Tower and Michigan Avenue.