Elizabeth Loizeaux

I have taught and continue to write about 20th century poetry. Pursuing a particular interest in the relations between literature and the visual arts, I have been most concerned with how individual poets have used the visual arts to expand the expressive capacities of language and to address questions of form and content that have compelled them individually and collectively. Yeats and the Visual Arts follows the varied engagements with the visual arts across the career of a single author. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts explores the prevalence of ekphrasis—the poetic representation of a work of art—across the 20th-century among poets in England, Ireland and the US. Pursuing my interest in the material presentation of texts, I co-edited with Neil Fraistat Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print.

From 2012-2019, I served as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs, working closely with BU’s 17 schools and colleges to promote collaboration and strengthen the undergraduate experience. With Bruce Schulman (History), I led the development of BU’s first university-wide general education program, the BU Hub. I also established the Advising Network, oversaw the evolution of Kilachand Honors College, expanded the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and helped initiate BU’s educational technology strategy and develop the Center for Teaching & Learning, among other efforts. Central to all my work was opening and supporting student access to all aspects of BU’s offerings across schools and colleges.

Currently, as Special Advisor to the Provost, I work on issues in higher education nationally. As former president of the Association of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU), I served on the UERU-convened Boyer 2030 Commission, co-chaired by AAU president Barbara Snyder and APLU president emeritus Peter McPherson, and was principle author of its report, The Equity-Excellence Imperative: A 2030 Blueprint for Undergraduate Education at U.S. Research Universities (October 2022). An update of the landmark 1998 Boyer Report, The Equity/Excellence Imperative sets out an urgent agenda for U.S. research universities to fundamentally enhance the distinctive education they provide millions of undergraduates, for the benefit of those students and broader human society.

Selected Publications

• “Family Business at Dun Emer and Cuala: Collaboration, Contention, and Creativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats, ed. Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023.
• Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Co-editor, with Neil Fraistat, Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
• Yeats and the Visual Arts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Paperback edition (with new preface). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Ch. 5 repr. in W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments, ed. David Pierce. Mountfield: Helm, 1999.