Our Team

Meechal Hoffman, the Institute’s Director, earned her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and her BA at Barnard College. She has taught first-year writing and literature courses at Baruch, and she was previously the Institute’s Associate Director. In her teaching and faculty development, she is particularly interested in the intersection between active learning and inclusive pedagogy. Her dissertation research focused on epistemology, affect, and the social and political utility of negative emotions in the British 19th-century novel.

Julia Goldstein is the Institute’s Associate Director. Previously, she was the inaugural Assistant Director for Writing in Public and International Affairs at Baruch, and before that, a Communication Fellow. She has taught communication at Baruch, theatre history at LaGuardia Community College, and high school English. Julia earned her PhD in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and her BA at Oberlin College. Her research examines the cultural politics of transnational theatre development initiatives.

Melina Moore, the Institute’s Assistant Director for Writing in Public and International Affairs, earned her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and her BA at Smith College. She was previously a Communication Fellow at the Institute. She has taught first-year writing and literature courses at Brooklyn College and Stern College for Women, and she served as a WAC Fellow at Medgar Evers College. Her dissertation research focused on representations of queer and trans people in mid-20th century American pulp paperbacks and subscription-based periodicals.

Debra Hilborn-Davis, is the Institute’s Program Coordinator for Student Support and Curriculum Development. In this role she operationalizes student support, refines existing curricula, and develops new course partnerships. Outside of the CTL, Debra teaches classes in writing and literature at NYU’s School of Professional Studies and has also taught courses in writing and communication at Baruch College and LaGuardia Community College. As a teacher and learner, she is especially interested in the connections between inclusive pedagogy, multilingual pedagogy, and Writing and Communication Across the Curriculum. Debra holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Tanzeem Ajmiri is a doctoral student in the Critical/Social Psychology Department at CUNY The Graduate Center. She has been teaching for six years at both Hunter College and LaGuardia Community College. In addition, she has been a Community Organizer for over ten years which has given her the opportunity to develop her facilitation skills which she uses in the classroom. Teaching is her passion and she is excited to be a Communication Fellow.

Orubba Almansouri is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds an MA in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and a BA in history and English from the City College of New York. Orubba is an educator working with immigrant youth and multilingual learners. Her research focuses on educational practices and programs that serve immigrant and multilingual learners as well as students experiences in these programs.

Sophia Bishop earned her PhD in Philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her BA in Philosophy from the University of Delaware. Her research considers the metaphysical fallout for the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with a particular interest in identity over time and counterpart hood. Sophia has taught philosophy at Baruch, Brooklyn College, and Wilmington University. In her teaching, which has centered around ethics, she strives to move students toward analytically examining their assumptions, so as to create logical, well-reasoned ethical positions.

Eva Dunsky has a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University, where she also taught a section of University Writing for International Students. As an alumna of the Writing Centers at both Barnard and Columbia, she is committed to inclusive writing pedagogy, helping writers land on a writing process that works for them, and ensuring that multilingual learners thrive. She is currently working on a novel and several translations from Spanish and Catalan into English.

Fabián Escalona is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation surveys the circulation of theatre and performance in the Latin American Southern Cone during the late colonial/early republican transitional era. He has taught courses in Theatre History, Art History, Human Rights and Oral Interpretation in New York and Santiago, Chile. He also has two years of experience as a Writing Across Curriculum fellow. As a former theatre critic, he collaborated with theatre journals and magazines in the US, Chile, and France. With a background in Art History and Theory, as well as Latin American Studies, his research interests focus on Latin American Theatre and Performance, Human Rights, and Postcolonial Studies.

Femi Lewis holds an MFA in Creative Writing from City College (CUNY) and an MSED in Secondary English Education from St. John’s University. An educator for over 20 years, Femi has taught in secondary and higher education settings, helping students develop their critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. In addition, Femi is a freelance journalist covering entrepreneurship and small business development.

 

Ivana Mellers is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on immigration from Latin America, laborers and consumers in the food system in the United States, and the food movement. Her dissertation examines the role immigrants and the second-generation play in the food sector in New York. Ivana holds a BA in Anthropology from Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and is a Fulbright Scholar. She has taught sociology courses at Baruch and food studies at NYU.

Charlie Rowe earned his PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research examines intersections between ethics and aesthetics in British and American Romantic poetry, with a particular focus on the embodied poetics of Walt Whitman. He has taught American history at Bronx Community College, literature and writing at Baruch College and Hunter College, and business communication at NYU’s School of Professional Studies.

Portia Seddon is a doctoral student in the Ethnomusicology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned her BA and MA degrees in Anthropology from Hunter College, CUNY. Portia has taught at Hunter College, CUNY in the Women & Gender Studies Department since 2012, and in the Music Department since 2017. Her research concerns the intersection of music, gentrification, and citizenship discourse, and her dissertation examines the ska-punk scene’s connections to the Mexican immigrant community in New York City.

Reid Vancelette is is finishing his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY, with an interest in morphosyntax, second language acquisition, heritage speakers, and psycholinguistics. His dissertation uses various psychological methods such as eye-tracking to investigate the acquisition of different types of case in second language learners of Russian in New York City and how, if possible, these learners use these cases as a cue in comprehension. He has taught multiple introductory linguistics courses, including Introduction to Language and Analyzing Language, at the undergraduate and graduate level in the Linguistics and Communication Disorders department at Queens College. He received his B.A. in both Linguistics and Russian from the University of Iowa, where he was a Division 1 gymnast.

Ji Hyon (Kayla) Yuh earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the socio-politico-cultural implications of South Korean musical theatre and how it reflects and reveals Koreans’ understanding of race and racialized identities within and outside the domestic contexts. She has taught theatre and communication courses at City College of University, Brooklyn College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She is a contributing author in the Routeledge Handbook of Asian Theatre, the Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers, and Dancing East Asia.