Eileen Gillooly is the Executive Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, with affiliations in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She earned her BA from Scripps College in 1977 and her PhD from Columbia in 1993.

Professor Gillooly's interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture in Britain and its colonies, gender studies, public humanities, justice studies, medical and health humanities, the history of the English novel, and literary and social theory. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2001), and of essays, articles, and reviews in such publications as Victorian Studies, ELH, Feminist Studies, The New York Times Book Review, Victorian Literary Cultures: A Critical Companion to the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Feminist Literary Theory: A Dictionary, The Victorian Comic Spirit, The Politics of Humour, Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, Feminist Nightmares/Women at Odds, Contemporary Dickens, and A Companion to British Literature (Wiley/Blackwell). She has edited the poetry of Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling (Sterling Publishing: 2000 and 2001) and is a contributing editor of Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (University of Virginia Press, 2007), with James Buzard and Joseph Childers, and Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State University Press, 2009; paperback, 2015), with Deirdre David. She has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, St. Deiniol’s Library (UK), and the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is currently the principal investigator on grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Columbia’s Justice-in-Education Initiative (2015-present: $2.8M). In 2002, she received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum. She has been an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2005-2008) and of the MLA Division for the Victorian Period (2009-2014; chair, 2013). She currently serves (at Columbia) on the executive committees of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and on the advisory committee of the Mellon Fellowship Program for Emerging Displaced Scholars. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Council for European Studies (CES), the Sydney Policy Lab (University of Sydney), Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism and the Arts (Columbia University Press). Ongoing projects include a book about parental feeling in nineteenth-century middle-class Britain and a digital, open-access diplomatic edition (with critical apparatus) of David Copperfield.

In her role as its Executive Director, Professor Gillooly serves ex officio on the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Elected Board members serve three-year, non-renewable terms: terms that exceed three years are served ex officio.