Thomas Kent has been named the new head of the English department.

Kent, who has been a professor of literary rhetorical theory at Iowa State for the past 12 years, will begin his new position July 1.

He was chosen through an in-house search to replace Dale Ross, who is retiring.

Kent said Ross has left “big shoes to fill. He’s made my job a little more difficult because I have to follow him in this department.”

In recent years the English department has shifted from a service-oriented department to a “full-fledged research department” with an emphasis on the Ph.D. program in rhetoric and a proposed Ph.D. program in linguistics, Kent said.

The department is still going through “growing pains” as it attempts to become a leader for the university in the area of writing.

“We want to work with other departments and other colleges to develop and help with writing across the curriculum,” Kent said.

The English department is the largest department on campus, with 350 undergraduate majors, about 80 graduate students, 62 tenure-track professors, about 65 teacher assistants and about 12 adjunct and temporary professors.

Some of the continuing goals of the department, Kent said, are to put a greater emphasis on undergraduate teaching, to find more ways to sponsor graduate students through fellowships and internships, to better fund research through acquisition of grants and to overhaul several internal policy and procedures.

Kent also said the department will be adding faculty. “We want to continue to recruit the quality kind of faculty we have had in the past.”

He said ISU’s English department is one of the top five or six in the country in rhetoric and composition, a relatively unknown fact, which Kent hopes to change by giving the department the recognition it deserves.