Reinhold Dooley featured image background

Reinhold Dooley

Professor of English

It’s the students that inspire Professor Reinhold Dooley. “I teach because of the students and because North Park is a Christian university that focuses on teaching,” says Dooley. He embraces that North Park is open to a wide range of beliefs among its faculty without diluting its Christian identity. For him, it is this range that allows us to be effective educators of the broadest spectrum of students.

Dooley’s courses create dialogue among all students, reading and thinking critically about literature together and in the context of Chicago and the diverse campus community. “We want students to appreciate how literature impacts and enriches their lives and how it allows them to better understand themselves and the people and the world around them,” he says.

Recent Publications

“Apocalypse and Neil LaBute’s ‘The Mercy Seat.’” Presentation at the Conference on Literature and Language, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., 2009.

Reinhold J. Dooley. “The Company We Keep.” The Cresset, vol 60 (September 1999): 33-35.

Popular Courses

“I love Eng1750 because it gives me the opportunity to show students why poetry is now, surprisingly, the most popular art form in the world.”

Professor Dooley teaches the American, modern, and postmodern literature courses in the major, as well as a student favorite, Film and Literature. Students in these courses are required to find evidence of modern and postmodern impacts on the city and culture by analyzing architecture, public art, museums, and cultural icons. He takes students to Michigan Avenue and does a semiotic reading of the Apple and Disney stores. Students then analyze the unintentional (and intentional) messages that are encoded in these businesses.