Center for Editing and Publishing

Sarah Allison received her PhD from Stanford University in 2012.  She specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature, with a particular focus on debates about the purpose of art--what writers in the period thought literature should teach, and how.  Her book project, Reductive Reading, reveals a counterintuitive truth about criticism: that one of the most powerful ways to generate subtle reading is to be reductive; that is, to design projects with the questions up front, with a clear statement of how we propose to find the answers. This book is a manifesto for and a model of how digital analysis can provide daringly simple approaches to complex literary problems.

Her research combines close reading at the level of the sentence with digital searches that trace patterns across large bodies of work.  She has co-authored three pamphlets on quantitative studies of literary style with the Stanford Literary Lab, two of which were subsequently reprinted in n+1.  Her article, “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax” has been published in ELH, and an essay on fact and fiction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Brontë is forthcoming in Genre in 2017, which is part of a second project tentatively titled True Fiction, a book on fictionality in biographies of the figures Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Hermione Lee.  She has also published in the Studies in the Novel-affiliated site Teaching Tools: Digital Humanities and the Novel, the essay collection Airplane Reading (Zero Books, 2016), and the book review section of the New Orleans Review. http://sarahdallison.com. As part of her developing scholarly interest in the circulation of Swedish texts in translation, she has recently affiliated with the Section on the Sociology of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. 

Classes Taught

• Reading Poetry
• Victorian England 

Areas of Expertise

• Victorian Literature
• Romanticism
• Poetry
• Literary Theory
• Digital Humanities Methods

Michael Giusti is the Chairman of the Journalism Department and the adviser for Loyola’s Student Media.  Prof. Giusti oversees "The Maroon," the university’s award-winning student newspaper,  "The Wolf," the student-run magazine, "The Maroon Minute," the morning video newscast, and The Maroon Online, the student-run news website.  Prof. Giusti is also a freelance reporter and contributes articles for several publications based in the United States and abroad covering topics ranging from financial services to the security industry. He has previously worked as an associate editor for "New Orleans CityBusiness" and as a reporter for the "Daytona Beach News-Journal."

After completing his B.A. in philosophy with a minor in bioethics from the University of Akron, Dr. Joel McClellan was then a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Panama. There, he worked in environmental education and sustainable development through 2005. Afterwards, he pursued and completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy, specializing in ethics at the University of Tennessee.  His dissertation “Minding Nature: A Defense of a Sentiocentric Approach to Environmental Ethics”, defends a sentience-based notion of moral considerability and argues that it provides compelling grounds for environmental conservation, and was supervised by John Nolt. Joel then spent one year apiece at Washington State University and Binghamton University, SUNY, with Visiting Assistant Professorships teaching courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of biology, and logic.  In the summer of 2013, Joel was a scholar-in-residence at Wesleyan University as the New York University Animal Studies Initiative’s 2013 Animal Ethics and Public Policy Fellow under the auspices of the Animals and Society Institute.  He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans.  His publications include articles in Ethics & Environment, Between the Species, and the Journal of Animal Ethics, and he has presented his research in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands to organizations such as the American Philosophical Association, International Society for Environmental Ethics, Minding Animals International, and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

Classes Taught

• Making Moral Decisions
• Environmental Ethics
• Medical Ethics

Areas of Expertise

• Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Environmental Ethics
• Medical Ethics
• Philosophy of Biology

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English, and an affiliated faculty member in Loyola's Environment Program. His scholarly interests include contemporary literature, creative nonfiction, cultural studies, critical theory, editing and publishing, and the environmental humanities. 

Dr. Schaberg is the author of three books on airports and air travel: The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017). 

He has also co-edited two essay collections, Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014, with Robert Bennett) and Airplane Reading (2016, with Mark Yakich). 

His latest book, called The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth (2018), reflects on teaching, reading, and writing in the early twenty-first century. 

Dr. Schaberg is founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of an essay and book series called Object Lessons which explores the hidden lives of ordinary things. This series offers hands-on opportunities for Loyola students who are interested in nonfiction writing as well as working in editing and publishing.

Classes Taught

• Writing About Texts
• 20th-Century American Fiction
• Reading Historically II
• Apocalypticism in Contemporary Literature & Theory
• Interpretive Approaches
• Reading (w/) the Digital Human
• "Thinking Space" (A First-Year Seminar)
• Environmental Theory
• Great Figures Seminar: David Foster Wallace
• Contemporary Nonfiction 
• Literature & Environment
• "Interpreting Airports" (An Honors First-Year Seminar) 
• Creative Nonfiction Workshop

Areas of Expertise

• Airports & air travel
• Contemporary literature
• Critical theory
• Cultural studies
• Environmental humanities
• Creative nonfiction
• Editing & publishing.

Lindsay Sproul received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and her PhD from Florida State University. Her short fiction has been published in Epoch, The Massachusetts Review, Witness, Hayden's Ferry Review, Glimmer Train and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from Columbia University and The MacDowell Artist Colony. Her first two novels, forthcoming from Putnam/Penguin Random House, are both queer coming-of-age narratives. 

Classes Taught

• Introduction to Creative Writing
• WAL: Coming of Age in the South
• Fiction Workshop

Areas of Expertise

• Fiction Writing
• Young Adult Fiction
• The Bildungsroman
• Queer Literature and Theory
• Gender Studies
• Creative Nonfiction

Dr. Catherine Wessinger is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans. She is co-director of the Loyola Himalaya Adventure: Summer Study in Dharamsala, India program. She is director of the Religion and Media Minor.  Her primary research and teaching areas are women in religions, new religious movements, religion and media, and Tibetan and Indian religions. Her articles in journals and chapters in edited books include history of religions and theoretical treatments of women and religion, millennialism, new religious movements, and religion and violence.

Since 2000 Dr. Wessinger has served as co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions published by University of California Press. 

Dr. Wessinger is editor of the Women in Religions series at New York University Press.

She is co-director of the Women in the World’s Religions and Spirituality Project, which is part of the World Religions and Spirituality Project online encyclopedia and archive.

Dr. Wessinger has published ten books. She is the author of Annie Besant and Progressive Millennialism (1988); and How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate (2000). She is editor of Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream (1993); Religious Institutions and Women's Leadership: New Roles Inside the Mainstream (1996); Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (2000); and Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (2011). Her oral history project with surviving Branch Davidians produced three autobiographies, which she edited: Memories of the Branch Davidians: Autobiography of David Koresh's Mother, by Bonnie Haldeman (2007); When They Were Mine: Memoirs of a Branch Davidian Wife and Mother, by Sheila Martin (2009); A Journey to Waco: Autobiography of a Branch Davidian, by Clive Doyle with Catherine Wessinger and Matthew D. Wittmer.  This oral history project has continued on her YouTube channel. Her most recent book is Theory of Women in Religions (2020)

She is currently writing a book on the Branch Davidian-Federal Agents Conflict for the Cambridge Elements Series on Religion and Violence and writing a book on Women in New Religious Movements for the Cambridge Elements Series on New Religious Movements.

Recent Publications

• Theory of Women in Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
• “The FBI’s ‘Cult War’ against the Branch Davidians.” In The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11, ed. Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman, 203-43. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
• “Millennialism.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements, ed. George D. Chryssides and Benjamin E. Zeller, 133-48. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
• “Apocalypse and Violence.” In The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. John J. Collins, 422-40. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• “The Second Generation Leaders of the Theosophical Society (Adyar).” In Brill Handbook of the Theosophical Current, ed. Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, 33-50. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion series. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Classes Taught

• Religions of the World
• Cults and Religions (Honors)
• Contemporary Issues and Conflicts in World Religions (Honors)
• Women in World Religions
• Tibetan and Indian Religions
• Women in Christianity
• Women in Religions and Cultures
• Hindu Paths to God
• Buddhism
• Religions of Asia
• Religion and Media
• Religion, Media and Culture
• New Religions and Media
• Religious Responses to Disaster
• Millennium Seminar
• Fundamentals of Conflict and Peace (team-taught)
• New Orleans Religions: Before and After Katrina (First-Year Experience seminar)

Mark Yakich is the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, where he is Director of the Center for Editing and Publishing. He is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), Green Zone New Orleans (Press Street 2008), The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin 2008),  Checking In/Checking Out (NO Books), A Meaning for Wife (Ig Publishing 2011) and Poetry: A Survivor's Guide (Bloomsbury 2015). With Christopher Schaberg, he is also co-founder and co-editor of airplanereading.org, a new media project that aims to rejunvenate airplane reading. In spring 2012, Mark was a Fulbright Fellow in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon.

Classes Taught

• Reading Poetry
• Introduction to Creative Writing
• Modern Poetry
• Writing Poetry
• Poetry Workshop: Series, Sequence, Chapbook
• Editing & Publishing
• Special Topics: Unreliable Narrators and Authors
• Honors: Words, Images, Politics

Areas of Expertise

• Poetry and Politics
• Experimental Poetics
• Art and Writing
• Creative Writing Pedagogy