» Teaching and Learning
Publication Opportunities
» Writing Intensive
Course Requirements
and Coordinators
2012 - 2013
WAC Fellows 2012 - 2013
Coordinators
Jacob Berger
Jacob Berger is a doctoral student in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center where he is focusing on the philosophy of mind. His dissertation will concern the relationship of the qualities of sensory mental states (such as the reddish quality of a sensation) to the perceptible properties of objects (such as the red color of an apple). He graduated from Swarthmore College in 2005. Before coming to City Tech, he taught several courses in Philosophy at Baruch College, including a course that focused on the intimate connection between thought and language. Because of this connection, he believes that helping students to acquire strong writing skills in turn helps them to think well.
Reagan Lothes
Reagan Lothes is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include Modernism and 20th and 21st century utopian and dystopian literature, with a focus on post-war English and American poetry. Her dissertation explores Sylvia Plath’s “conversation” with women Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, Amy Lowell, and Edith Sitwell, about the relation of women’s experience to what Plath called the “bigger things,” such as war and history.
She has been teaching at John Jay College since 2001. During this time, she has taught a range of composition courses, from developmental to a second-year course focused on preparing students for writing across the disciplines, and the themes of these courses have included media studies, fashion studies, and utopian studies. She has also taught American literature, Modern Literature, with a focus on utopian and dystopian literature, and an author’s course on Sylvia Plath for the Distinguished Students Program.
In addition to her experience at John Jay, she has worked at Katherine Gibbs, teaching Business Communications and composition courses to students with such majors as information technology and fashion design.
Her experience both as a student and teacher convinces her daily of the value of writing as a process of learning and discovery. She looks forward to the many discoveries the faculty and students at City Tech, with their diversity of interests and backgrounds, hold in store.
Myrto Mylopoulos
Myrto Mylopoulos is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection between agency and consciousness. Before coming to the Graduate Center, she completed an M.A. in Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. While there, she had a chance to work as a teaching assistant for a number of writing intensive philosophy courses, where she learned some of the basic principles behind Writing Across the Curriculum, and came to better appreciate the central role that writing plays in learning. She has since had a chance to put what she learned into practice in her own teaching at CUNY's Brooklyn College, where she taught philosophy from 2007 - 2010. She's looking forward to her role as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at City Tech.
Norman Perlmutter
Norman Perlmutter grew up in Toledo, Ohio, the oldest of three siblings. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA and a M.A. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has also taken philosophy courses at the graduate level at CUNY. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at the CUNY Graduate Center, conducting research in set theory under the supervision of Joel David Hamkins. He expects to complete his Ph.D. in May 2013 and hopes to pursue a career in academia.
He taught algebra, precalculus, and calculus for three years at City College. He also has extensive experience as a private math tutor and completed an actuarial internship one summer at AXA Equitable while he was an undergraduate.
His nonacademic interests include travelling internationally, playing go, reading science fiction, and attending Off Off Broadway theater.
Kareem Rabie
Kareem Rabie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include state theory, political economy and uneven development, subjectivity and the formation of political ideology, and the Middle East. His dissertation examines the present push towards privatization in the housing market, and the contemporary state-building project in the West Bank. Over four years at Hunter College, he taught Introduction to Cultural Anthropology as well as courses on the anthropology of the Middle East and on political anthropology. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a fellow on the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Seokhee Yoon
Seokhee (Kiki) Yoon is currently a doctoral student in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. During her graduate career, she has participated in projects concerning restorative justice, sentencing downward departures, crime and immigration, workplace victimization and robbery patterns. Her research interests include victimization, research methods (especially quantitative methods), evidence-based policy and collateral effects of imprisonment. She was accepted to the Quantitative Analysis of Crime and Criminal Justice program at Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research in 2010, where she examined the reasons why victims do not report to the police. Her dissertation is an extension of that project and will utilize a multi-level analysis.
Laureen Park
Laureen Park is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Social Science Department at City Tech. She is the former college CPE Liaison. The position taught her the importance of supporting students’ proficiency in writing, which also relates to communication and critical thinking skills. She is committed to the principles of WAC and believes that the way to become proficient at writing is through habitual practice. ‘You don’t become skilled at writing by not doing it.’ Her scholarly interests include phenomenological approaches to the philosophy of science and psychoanalytic approaches to conflict resolution.
Jody Rosen
Jody R. Rosen, an assistant professor in the English Department at New York City College of Technology, has worked with WAC for many years. A former Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at the College of Staten Island and Senior Communication Fellow at Baruch College’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, she integrates writing-intensive and communication-intensive approaches into her composition and literature courses. Her scholarship focuses on narrative theory, Modernisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She holds an AB from Brown University and a PhD and Women’s Studies Certificate from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Eric Lynch
Eric Lynch is a doctoral candidate in French literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the relationship between text and image in contemporary French poetry and the visual arts. He has taught French courses at both Brooklyn College and Fordham University. In summer of 2012, he also taught a writing intensive core curriculum course. A participant in CUNY’s Paris study abroad program in 2010-2011, he instructed French students learning English. He looks forward to applying his experience in teaching a foreign language to help students more effectively communicate while writing in English.
Jeremy Benson
Jeremy Benson is a PhD candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include critical pedagogy, critical literacy, education policy and history, and critical theory, as well as criminology, disability studies, and the sociology of medicine. His dissertation is centered on a comparative historical analysis of drug policy and education policy since the early 1980's, looking at areas of discursive and ideological overlap between the two seemingly autonomous institutional spheres.
He has been teaching at Hunter College since 2008 in the Education Foundations and Curriculum and Teaching departments. His courses include Diversity in American Education, Social, Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education, Building Foundations of Literacy, and Sociology of Education. Previous to his work teaching at college level, he taught high school English in Hillsborough, New Jersey.
Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh
Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh is a Ph.D student in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is focusing on sociological and cultural analyses on transnational productions of musical theatre in the United States and in Asia, especially in Korea and Japan. She is also interested in theories and practices of inter/intra/transcultural theatrical performances, especially in regards to the migration of discourses and ideas on race, and how these -cultural activities intersect with(in) transnational performances. Before coming to City Tech, she taught Speech Foundation, Introduction to Theatre Arts, and Asian Theatre at City College of New York. After having spent many years working on her own sets of writing skills, she is excited to work as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at City Tech, to exchange ideas and share her experiences.
Evelina Mendelevich
Evelina Mendelevich is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines parallels between Fyodor Dostoevsky’s and Henry James’s mutually illuminating concepts of art and its relation to life, with a focus on the two authors’ view of writing and reading as a mode of experience. She has taught a variety of courses in literature and composition at Brooklyn College and City College. She also taught Russian language and culture at Brooklyn College and Columbia University. As a teacher, she aspires to pass on to her students her appreciation for the process and power of writing. In all of her courses, she employs a variety of writing assignments, many of which make use of Web 2.0 technologies, to engage students with the subject and promote learning. Her conviction that writing is the single most valuable tool in any learner’s toolbox has led her to join the community of CUNY Writing Across the Curriculum Fellows, and she looks forward to fulfilling her role and to sharing her enthusiasm and experience with the faculty and students at City Tech.
Zachary Aidala
Zachary is a fourth-year doctoral student in Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at the CUNY Graduate Center. He came to CUNY in 2007 to start an MA in Psychology at Hunter College with a concentration in Animal Behavior and Conservation. His Masters work focused on the neurotoxic and behavioral effects of environmental mold exposure in mice. After finishing his MA in 2009, he entered the Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience program where he now studies the evolution of sensory and perception systems in birds. He is specifically interested in the evolution of visual perception in hosts of avian brood parasites (birds that lay their eggs in the nests of others). His doctoral work incorporates a mix of behavioral and molecular techniques to better understand the dynamics of evolutionary pressures and outcomes. Prior to joining the WAC program at City Tech, he taught a Brain and Behavior course in addition to serving as a TA for Experimental Psychology, Statistics, and Introduction to Psychology courses. Zachary also worked as a GK-12 STEM Fellow from 2010 – 2012 where he collaborated with local NYC high schools to develop and improve science curriculum and courses. He has found that writing challenges students to actively interact with and synthesize information, and looks forward to further developing this approach with both faculty and students as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at City Tech.
Jesse Willard
Jesse Willard hails from the Seattle area and comes to City Tech from the CUNY Graduate Center’s Political Science department, where he focuses on the political nature of black and grey markets and the power of borders. He is thrilled to dig more deeply into the Writing Across the Curriculum program, having found his efforts to teach through writing at Queens College challenging but rewarding. Further, he is particularly looking forward to thinking through the particular needs of City Tech students and faculty with regard to how writing in the classroom can work best for them.