Professor Kirk McAuley has been appointed chair of the Department of English within the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Aug. 16. McAuley succeeds Donna Potts.
The Department of English comprises faculty who work in some of the most dynamic areas of literary studies, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, English education, and applied linguistics, and it also provides an administrative home to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
“As chair, I look forward to strengthening and reinforcing connections across (and beyond) English,” said McAuley. “Undoubtedly, the best part of serving so large and complicated an organization as the Department of English would have to be the numerous opportunities it offers to celebrate and promote the work of faculty, staff, and students — all of whom are engaged in a dazzling array of interrelated activities — i.e., research, readings, workshops, performances, presentations, community-engaged projects, and teaching innovations.”
McAuley teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature focusing on a variety of areas: contradiction, the Gothic, and science fiction film. “My primary goal is always the same: to create opportunities for students to engage in meaningful conversations about literature and culture — conversations that touch upon some of the most urgent problems confronting the world today,” he said.
In 2015–16, McAuley was a US-UK Fulbright scholar at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, UK. He has received several other awards and accolades, including an ASECS-Keough Naughton summer fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, and he served as the Lawrence Ruff Visiting Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Dayton.
“Professor McAuley brings a remarkable depth of experience and passion for advancing the scholarship and creative work of the Department of English. His commitment to cultivating critical thinking and effective communication across the department contributes to our students’ academic success and prepares our graduates to lead in their professions,” said Dean Courtney Meehan.
An author of two books, of which his latest, The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894, was featured in the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s (ASLE) 2024–25 Spotlight Series, and it was shortlisted for the 2025 ASLE-UKI book prize in ecocriticism. A third book in development is a critical revaluation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Imperial Gothic Fiction and the radical ways in which Gothic natures (animals, plants, and fungi) decenter the human.
