Category: Spring 2025

Don’t Disappear: An Interview with Graduate Teaching Fellows Ghenwa Antonios and Alexander Pau Orejuela

Madeleine Barnes

Ghenwa Antonios has a Master’s degree in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center. My research interests include modern Arabic literature, spatial theories with a particular focus on the coffeehouse as a site of intellectual discourse and political consciousness in Middle Eastern literary and cultural imagination.

Alexander Pau Soria is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center. His research interests include subjectivity under capitalism, socialist realism, and intellectual history.

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Lineages of Learning: An Interview with Professor Safia Jama

Madeleine Barnes

Safia Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Akashic Books, 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Crowded House (Beltway Editions, 2023), was selected for Slapering Hol Press’s Eight Debut Poets. She is a Lecturer teaching first-year writing at Baruch College.

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The First Year: An Interview with Graduate Teaching Fellows Coco Fetterman and Alex Hall

Madeleine Barnes

Coco Sofia Fitterman is the author of the chapbook Say It With Flowers (Inpatient Press 2017). She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Baruch College, as well as a Poetry Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and an Events Fellow at Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Alex Hall is a visual and sonic artist, a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Baruch College.

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Celebration in Praxis: An Interview with Graduate Teaching Fellow Ju Ly Ban

Madeleine Barnes

Ju Ly Ban is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches composition at Baruch College. Her research moves through Black feminism, queer kinship, and translation. Drawn to poetry and letters, she created JULY PO BOX, an online multilingual project for slow, thoughtful letter exchange. In and beyond the classroom, she seeks ways to bridge the words of fellow researchers, artists, and activists.

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Investigating the Corporate World: Reflections on my ENG 2150 Class (Part II)

Madeleine Barnes

by Nathan Nikolic

Note: This piece is part one of a two-part article; part one, which discusses course design and syllabus structure, was published in our Fall 2024 Issue.

Purposeful Group Work

As a college student, I generally hated group projects because it usually meant one or two students (I was always one of them) would do everything while the rest slacked off. And if that was the case, why have group assignments at all? Determined to avoid this problem, I thought long and hard about how to design the report assignment, and I talked to other instructors about their approaches to group work. After a lot of thinking and discussion, I decided on two crucial elements to prioritize when it came to group work: 1) each student must be individually responsible for producing a specified amount of writing, and 2) the task assigned to the group must be genuinely large and complex enough that working together wasn’t merely a pedagogical contrivance but a necessity of the project itself. To address the first issue, I made each group complete a work distribution plan early on in the semester.

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