Meet the Faculty
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Reach out to our faculty if you have questions about Professional Writing courses!
Phil Hayek
Senior Lecturer
Phil Hayek (PhD, Virginia Tech) teaches ENGL 380: Advanced Professional Writing, ENGL 383: Writing for Digital Media, and ENGL 384: Technical Writing. His research interests include rhetorical genre studies, strategic communication and national security. Selected publications: “The National Security Strategy as a Genre: Dynamic and Adaptable or Constraining Creativity,” “The National Security Strategy as an Object of Business Communication.”
Sammie Burton
Lecturer
Sammie Marie Burton (EdD, Loyola University Chicago) teaches ENGL 382: Editing and Publishing. Her research interests center on academic writing as a mode of personal transformation and curriculum design. Selected publications: Exploring the Educational Journeys of African American Honors Alumni(nae) and Pursuing Racial Equity in Suburban High Schools
Jeffrey Kessler
Senior Lecturer
Jeffrey C. Kessler (PhD, Indiana University) teaches ENGL154: Understanding Grammar and Style, ENGL 280: Media and Professional Writing, ENGL 383: Writing for New and Digital Media, and ENGL 493: Internship in Non-Fiction Writing. He is the Coordinator of the Internship Program. His research interests include Attention Theory, Close Reading, Digital Media, and Literary Studies. Selected Publications: Writing for Inquiry and Research, “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Imaginary’ Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” and “Automated Feedback Is One Possible Resource Among a Larger Writing Environment, Requiring Critical AI Literacy” (forthcoming).
Karen Leick
Clinical Assistant Professor
Karen Leick (PhD, Northwestern University) is the Director of the Professional Writing Program. She teaches ENGL 280: Media and Professional Writing, ENGL 389: Writing for Community Advocacy and Activism, and ENGL 496: Portfolio Practicum. Her research interests include media studies, literary modernism, and professional writing. Selected publications: Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity, Modernism on File: Writers, Artists and the FBI, 1920-1950, and Parents, Media and Panic Through the Years: Kids Those Days.
Jay Shearer
Senior Lecturer
Jay Shearer (PhD, UIC) teaches ENGL 154: Understanding Rhetoric, ENGL 280: Media and Professional Writing, and ENGL 496: Portfolio Practicum. He writes fiction, essays and plays. Selected publications: a novel (Five Hundred Sirens, Cairn Press), a novelette (The Pulpit vs. the Hole, Gold Line Press), and stories in Chicago Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.
Bridget English
Senior Lecturer
Bridget English (PhD, Maynooth University, Ireland) teaches ENGL 388: Writing for the Health Professions. Her research interests include Irish studies, health humanities, and literary modernism. Selected publications: Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, and The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature.
Keegan Lannon
Lecturer
Keegan Lannon (PhD, Aberystwyth University) teaches ENGL 154: Understanding Rhetoric. His research centers on empathy and narrative, with a focus on visual narratives (comics and graphic novels). He has professional experience with local journalism, copy-editing, translating legal and medical documents, and writing technical manuals. Selected publications: “I’m Just a Comic Book Boy”: Essays on the Intersection of Comics and Punk, “Ungrading and Assessing the Unassessable”
Gregor Baszak
Lecturer
Gregor Baszak (PhD, UIC) teaches ENGL 280: Media and Professional Writing. A freelance journalist on the side, his writing instruction teaches audience awareness and simplicity and concreteness over abstractness and jargon. His writing has appeared, among other places, in The American Conservative, Antiwar.com, UnHerd, Sublation, and in his native German language in Cicero and Makroskop.