The Editorial Institute at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

was founded in 2000 by

Christopher Ricks Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks (born 18 September 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston ...

and

Geoffrey Hill Sir Geoffrey William Hill, Royal_Society_of_Literature#Fellowship, FRSL (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston Uni ...

with "the conviction that the textually sound, contextually annotated edition is central to the intellectual life of many disciplines." The primary aims of the Institute are to promote critical awareness of editorial issues and practices and to train students in editorial methods. The Institute is co-directed by the literary editors and critics Archie Burnett and

; Frances Whistler was the Assistant Director and Director of Publications until her departure. The Institute offers a Masters and a doctoral degree to students who successfully prepare editions of important writings, with textual apparatus and annotation, or monographs concerned with editing or textual bibliography. According to the website, "students are encouraged to think widely about the applications of editing: to letters, sound archives, oral transcripts, music, manuscript fragments, legal and historical documents, journalism, notebooks, anonymous writings, and marginalia, as well as to the literary and philosophical writing most often associated with the idea of the edition." The Institute enjoys the cooperation of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the

Mugar Memorial Library The Mugar Memorial Library is the primary library for study, teaching, and research in the humanities and social sciences for Boston University. It was opened in 1966. Stephen P. Mugar, an Armenian immigrant who was successful in the grocery b ...

in addition to the archives of the Boston University School of Theology. It also has ties to a wide range of academic disciplines within the University. Its course offerings for the advanced degrees include: The Theory and Practice of Literary Editing, Textual Scholarship, The History of the Book, Editing and Publishing, Editing Across the Disciplines, Annotations, Editions, and Word and Image. Current projects of the Editorial Institute include a number of important literary editions. In 2007, ''Letters of A. E. Housman'', was published by Archie Burnett, one of the co-directors of the Institute, and an edition in eleven volumes of the Selected Writings of the Victorian lawyer and controversialist

James Fitzjames Stephen Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India, KCSI (3 March 1829 – 11 March 1894) was an English lawyer, judge, writer, and philosopher. One of the most famous critics of John Stuart Mill, S ...

is being edited by

and Frances Whistler. The full critical edition, prepared by Ricks and joint-editor Jim McCue, of the poems of T. S. Eliot appeared in 2015. As of January 2023, "admissions to the Institute’s Ph.D. program are currently on hold."

References

{{Boston University Boston University 2000 establishments in the United States