Center for Editing and Publishing

Sarah D. Allison is the Hutchinson Distinguished Professor and Director of Composition at Loyola University New Orleans and the author of The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery (Columbia University Press, 2025). It draws on interlocking computational approaches - book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism - to create a study of “portraits of authors” that centers the many players who worked to produce the figure of the Transatlantic celebrity author. It argues for the value of data-based approaches in thinking across fields of specialization, as does a special issue of Studies in the Novel she co-edited with Megan Ward: “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel” (2024).

She specializes in large-scale textual analysis and the novels and criticism of nineteenth-century Britain. also the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018). As a member of Stanford’s Literary Lab, she was a co-author of its first pamphlet, “Quantitative Formalism,” a study of style and genre, as well as “Style at the Scale of the Sentence,” and “Canon, Archive and Literary History,” all since reprinted in the volume Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism (n+1 books, 2017). Her work has appeared in PMLA, ELH, Genre, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Public Books, and Avidly. You can read more about her research and publications here.

 She is affiliated with the Section on the Sociology of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Classes Taught

• First-Year Seminar: Why Poetry?
• Critical Reading and Writing: Local News (Service Learning Component)
• Literature of Protest
• Reading Poetry
• Jane Austen and Fan Culture
• Great Figures: Charles Dickens and Shonda Rhimes
• 19th Century British Fiction and Digital Methods

Areas of Expertise

• Novels, poetry, and nonfiction in the nineteenth century
• Algorithmic criticism
• Transatlantic print culture
• Escape reading

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

Lindsay Sproul is the Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches creative writing and literature with a focus on queer studies, disability, social class, trauma, and colonization. She is the author of We Were Promised Spotlights (Putnam/Penguin Random House), and her short fiction and essays have appeared in Epoch, Glimmer Train, The Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, Adi Magazine, The Pinch, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere.

Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Iceland, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Carter and Marquette Fellowships at Loyola. In addition to her teaching and writing, Sproul serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the New Orleans Review, where she curates special issues and highlights international and diasporic voices.

Classes Taught

• Internship in Editing & Publishing: New Orleans Review
• WAL: Sapphic Literature & Film
• MENA Diaspora: Literature, Film, and Identity
• Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
• Trauma Writing
• Introduction to Creative Writing

Areas of Expertise

• Queer Studies
• Young Adult Literature
• Disabilities Studies
• Social Class, Anti-Capitalism, and Decolonization
• SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Literature and Film
• Creative Writing (Prose)
• Editing

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