Faculty

The faculty in the Liberal Studies graduate program vary across multiple disciplines to provide a broad spectrum of knowledge and course offerings for students. They are experts in their field and passionate about their subject matter. They are anxious to share their knowledge with their students and promote dialogue and further exploration of the course material.

The list below provides a thumbnail sketch of the professional interests and background for faculty teaching In spring 2012

James J. Buckley has his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University and has taught in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Maryland for over thirty years.    Most of his research and writing has been in contemporary Catholic and Protestant theology as well as philosophical theology.   He looks forward to learning as much as he teaches in this new course! 

James Bunzli has taught performance at Loyola for over ten years. His specialty in Solo Performance has resulted in numerous publications on the subject in such journals as The Drama Review and Theatre Annual. In addition, he has created and performed solo work, including Time and the Means, which was featured at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2006. Recently, he has worked extensively with other performers in the creation of new solo work. He developed and directed Cheryl Hamilton’s Checkered Floors, Gayle Danley’s Naked, and Robert Hubbard’s How Helicopters Figure in My Dreams and Blizzards and Floods. He has directed at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, often helming Solo shows. He recently completed a sabbatical leave during which he undertook a book-length project examining the role of autobiography in contemporary solo performance.

Steven Burr teaches in the theology department at Georgetown University and the graduate liberal studies program at Loyola University Maryland. His current work has focused on hermeneutics and phenomenology as particular ways of experiencing and understanding the world, as well as existentialist attempts to characterize and confront the “human condition” within that world. He just completed his doctoral degree at Georgetown University.with a dissertation, a hermeneutic of ‘existential exile,’

Randall Donaldson is an Associate Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Director of the Liberal Studies Program. He has served in a variety of capacities as both teacher and administrator over many years at the College. He has taught in the Liberal Studies program since the mid-eighties. Dr. Donaldson did his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins, where he developed a special interest in German-American literary relations. He has made numerous presentations on German-American culture and published a number of articles on the topic as well. His book, The Literary Legacy of a “Poor Devil”: the Life and Work of Robert Reitzel (1849–1898), dealt with the literary career of a radical and controversial German-American journalist. He currently edits the Report, the journal of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland, and is working on a book on the history of the German element in Maryland.

David Dougherty is Professor Emeritus of English and Liberal Studies at Loyola University Maryland.  For a decade he directed the Graduate Program in Liberal Studies. A Woodrow Wilson Dissertation fellow while at Miami University, he has published and lectured extensively on modern and post-modern American writers.  He wrote TUSAS books on James Wright (1986) and Stanley Elkin (1991) and edited the Dalkey Archive casebooks on Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show and The Magic Kingdom, writing the introductory chapters for each. The Dalkey Archive edition of Elkin’s A Bad Man includes his foreword, “Meeting Bad Men.” His journal and reference book essays treat dozens of American and British writers, including Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, Laura Lippman, Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Updike. He also completed a series of mini-biographies of sports figures for Scribner’s Encyclopedia of American Lives, and biographical sketches of King Richard II, King Edward IV, and American president Jimmy Carter. “Archetypal Batters,” (2005) studies baseball as trope in postmodern American fiction.  The November 2007 issue of New England Review contains two Elkin short stories he rescued from archival oblivion. Shouting Down the Silence, the authorized biography of Elkin, came out in April 2010, and the current project is a book about the integration of major league baseball. 

Timothy Houghton is Affiliate Associate Professor of English and Writing. He received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Modern British and American Literature from the University of Denver. He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent (2012) of which is The Height in Between. He has received more than twenty-five fellowships to work on his poetry. For over thirty years, he has taught a variety of courses in literature, essay writing, and creative writing.