Announcing Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J., Ph.D., as Vice President for Mission and Ministry

Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community:

It is with deep gratitude that I share with you today that Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J., Ph.D., will serve as our next Vice President for Mission and Ministry, beginning on August 1, 2017.  He will also hold an appointment as a Professorial Lecturer in our Department of English.

Fr. Bosco comes to us from Loyola University Chicago, where he is a tenured faculty member in both the Department of Theology and the Department of English.  He also serves as Director of The Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage (CCIH) at Loyola Chicago, a position he has held since 2012.

Fr. Bosco will bring to our University an extraordinary understanding of our Catholic and Jesuit tradition and the way it influences and strengthens all that we do.  As Director of the CCIH, he leads a wide variety of symposia, lectures, film series, and conferences designed to deepen scholarly research and provide opportunities for conversation on the Catholic intellectual tradition and how that tradition can be “explored, communicated, and renewed” in meaningful ways.  Fr. Bosco also shares our University’s commitment to advancing interfaith and ecumenical dialogue and understanding, and will work with colleagues in our Office of Mission and Ministry to further animate our efforts to help our students live lives of deep meaning and purpose.

As a scholar, Fr. Bosco focuses much of his work on the intersection of theology and art—specifically, the British and American Catholic literary tradition—and has published on a number of authors, including Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.  He is the author or co-editor of three books and nearly 20 articles and book chapters, and he teaches classes on a wide range of topics, including the Catholic Literary Tradition, Sacramental Theology, Theological Aesthetics, Art and Religious Imagination, and 20th Century American and British Literature.  He is also the producer, director, and writer of “Flannery O’Connor: Acts of Redemption,” a feature-length documentary under discussion with PBS/American Masters.

Prior to joining the Loyola Chicago University community in 2003, Fr. Bosco taught at the University of San Francisco and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Theology and Literature from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley and his M.Div. from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley.  You can learn more about Fr. Bosco here .

I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to Rev. Howard Gray, S.J., Ph.D., who has served as our Interim Vice President for Mission and Ministry, and has led our community with a profound care over these last months.  I also wish to thank Fr. Matthew Carnes, S.J., Ph.D., Jeanne Lord, J.D., Ed.D., and Rev. Bryant Oskvig—along with our colleagues in the Office of Mission and Ministry and the members of our Jesuit community—for all their efforts to guide our search process.

I look forward to introducing Fr. Bosco to you in the coming months.  Please join me in offering him our warmest welcome.

You have my very best wishes.

Sincerely,

John J. DeGioia