LUC’s Department of English is delighted to welcome three new professors to the faculty this fall.

The new Martin J. Svaglic Chair of Textual Studies, Dr. Marta L. Werner, comes to the department with a distinguished record of scholarship in Nineteenth Century Studies, particularly focusing on the work of American poet Emily Dickinson. Previously, her work at D’Youville College has included several edited collections of Dickinson’s works, such as Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) and The Gorgeous Nothings, an artist’s book on Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, co-authored with Jen Bervin (New York: Granary Books, 2012 / New Directions, 2013). Her book The Master Hours of Emily Dickinson is forthcoming from Amherst College Press. She is also the editor-in-chief of Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, the official journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship. Currently, Dr. Werner is embarked on a sound-study of Dickinson’s bird imagery in her poems, a collaborative digital project entitled “These tested Our Horizon –’: De-archivizing Dickinson’s Birds on the Shores of the Anthropocene.” She explains that this endeavor “seeks to re-construct one thin bandwidth of Dickinson’s vanished soundscape by capturing — albeit incompletely — the calls and songs of the distant descendants of the birds of her world, while simultaneously encouraging us to measure and reflect upon the ecological distances, both actual and perceived, between Dickinson’s sound-world and our own.” This semester Dr. Werner teaches the graduate course “Textual Criticism.” Further details of her research, work with students, and various projects can be found here.

Dr. Long Le-Khac, Assistant Professor in American literatures from 1945 to the present, brings his studies in Modern and Contemporary Asian and Latinx literatures and culture to LUC’s Department of English. He has created projects at the intersection of Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and Race and Ethnicity Studies. Previously, Dr. Le-Khac has taught courses on multi-ethnic American, Asian American, and Latinx literatures, post-1945 American fiction, comparative ethnic studies, migration, and narrative forms at Washington University, St. Louis and Stanford University, acting as a support for minority students and those from diverse backgrounds. Dr. Le-Khac’s book Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America, which he describes as following “a form of transfictional storytelling across the writings of Asian American and Latinx communities to reveal their historical links and shared struggles,” is forthcoming from Stanford University Press, 2020. Dr. Le-Khac claims, “My work is driven by two convictions. First, that race must be understood relationally and through comparative methods, particularly as the U.S. approaches a multi-racial, minority-majority future. Second, that literature and politics are intertwined in fascinating ways even as we strive to grasp the specificity of each.” Currently Dr. Le-Khac teaches two undergraduate literature courses entitled “Easy Riders, Migrant Laborers: American Mobility in Literature and Culture.” More about Dr. Le-Khac’s scholarship and teaching philosophy can be found here.

Dr. Jayme Stayer joins the department as Associate Professor in Twentieth Century Literatures. Currently, he also serves as President of the International T. S. Eliot Society. His monograph, Becoming T. S. Eliot, on the development of voice and audience in Eliot’s early poetry, has just been completed. Together with Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi, Dr. Stayer has recently edited The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939 (Johns Hopkins UP and Faber and Faber, 2017). Besides these works, he has co-authored an introductory rhetoric textbook Think About It (2013) with John and Karen Mauk, for use in college classrooms. Dr. Stayer explains, “The work that most excites me, in my own research and those whom I read with interest, is historical research, which includes archival work that digs up forgotten contexts, buried manuscripts, and lost ideas, restoring them to the aesthetic texts from which they have been stripped by time and tide. As a consequence, I am also interested in reception history.” At previous institutions, such as John Carroll, Texas A&M University-Commerce, and Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador, he has taught classes on poetry, focusing on issues of human communication and rhetoric, followed by an emphasis on history and biography. Right now, he is teaching two sections of an undergraduate foundational course of literary studies. Further information regarding Dr. Stayer’s interests and publications can be found here.

A warm welcome to Loyola University Chicago!