Briana Brickley          Young-hwan Byun Paul Fess Erika Mazzer John McMahon Jon Rachmani Esty Rajwan-Heber Amy Vogel-Eyny

Briana Brickley

My areas of specialization include contemporary postcolonial and multi-ethnic American literatures, cultural studies, and critical theory. My current research focuses on various forms of inequality that get exaggerated under global capitalism—from the economic, to the corporeal, to the disciplinary. I employ the body as a critical analytic with which to read a contemporary, transnational literary archive that includes texts from authors such as Chris Abani, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

As a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow, I worked with Hunter’s English 220 (“Introduction to Writing About Literature”) program. Primarily, my job was to guide new Graduate Teaching Fellows through their first year. I helped facilitate training sessions and participated in monthly meetings throughout the year, covering a range of topics from pedagogy and course design, to scaffolding assignments and grading practices. I also developed a number of materials for students, including writing guides (“Asking a Research Question” and “Close Reading: A Quick and Easy Guide”) for the Hunter Library website and a series of workshops that focused on crucial skills like critical reading, research, and incorporating secondary materials, offered to 220 students outside of class.

Young-hwan Byun

Young-hwan Byun is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation research studies politics of income distribution in industrialized democracies in Europe, America, and East Asia since the 1980s. Particularly, it explains why the middle class in some countries has declined but has grown in others. As a WAC Fellow at Hunter College (affiliated with History Department), Young-hwan has participated in the History Department Assessment Project, for which he analyzed the Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) on all syllabi for History 151 and 152 courses, based on the department’s Key Learning Outcomes (KLOs). He made a report that documented how each course’s learning outcomes reflected the department’s learning outcomes. In addition, Young-hwan has consulted with students to help improve their essays during his weekly office hours. He has held both in-class and independent workshops to introduce students to important writing topics, including the Chicago Manual Style, plagiarism, and the structure of an academic essay.

Paul Fess

I am a doctoral candidate specializing in American literature, African American literature, and sound studies. Currently, I’m working on my dissertation, “Resonant Texts: The Politics and Practices of 19th-century African American Musical Cultures of Print from Abolitionism to the Player Piano,” which examines how music structured the politics and literature of race, enslavement, and citizenship across the 19th century. During the 2014/15 academic year I was a WAC fellow in the English Department at Hunter and worked with the Freshmen Composition program in the English Department.

As WAC fellow my chief task was to hold workshops throughout the semester dealing with relevant topics for students enrolled in ENGL 120 and 220. Students also tended to benefit from more generalized discussions about aspects of the writing process, which tended to depend on where students were in writing specific assignments for their classes. I also met one-on-one with students during office hours, and I occasionally helped faculty via email and in person. ​​

Erika Mazzer

During the 2014 – 2015 academic year I worked as Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow both with faculty and students in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College. I offered workshops addressing different aspects of the writing process, focusing on reading effectively, taking notes, outlining and writing a research paper. At the same time I designed my own syllabus for a Writing Intensive course, created presentations and handouts on reading and writing essays, and developed a whole range of assignments, low-stakes and high-stakes, to improve the writing skills of the students.

In addition I offered a Writing Tutoring Service for students dealing with writing issues. The WAC experience at Hunter College gave me the opportunity to help students overcome their difficulties with the writing process, and deepen my own knowledge about it. I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature (Italian Specialization) at the Graduate Center, writing my dissertation on the legacy of magic in both literary and historical sources of 15th and 16th centuries Venice. In this crucial stage of my doctoral program the opportunity to find strategies to solve the challenges of the writing process with students has been an inspiration to proceed with my own work. 

John McMahon

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science (political theory) and the Women’s Studies Certificate Program at the The Graduate Center, CUNY. My interests include modern and contemporary political theory, emotion and affect, feminist theory, queer theory, and Foucault. I work as a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at The Graduate Center, and have taught courses in Political Theory and American Politics in the Political Science Department at Hunter College, CUNY. I am a co-founder and co-host of the Always Already Podcast, a critical and political theory podcast.

In my year as a WAC Fellow at Hunter, I served the Political Science Department, working one-on-one with students on their writing, providing tutoring both in person and over email. I led writing workshops in specific classes as well as department workshops open to all the department’s students, the topics including critical reading and note taking, writing take-home and in-class essay exams, research in political science, citations and plagiarism, the term paper process, making arguments and using sources, and literature reviews. Finally, I consulted with faculty on assignment design and on using in-class write-to-learn activities to develop writing skills while working through course material.

Jon Rachmani

Jon Rachmani acted as the WAC fellow for the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. His duties included tutoring, consulting with professors on students’ progress, performing the semi-annual evaluation of newly-admitted students’ writing samples, and conducting workshops on essay revision. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the Graduate Center. His dissertation concerns the representation of space in the Victorian novel.

Esty Rajwan-Heber

I am currently a 5th year student in the Clinical Psychology program at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. I had the opportunity to work as a WAC fellow this year in collaboration with Professor Bryan Dowling in the Hunter College Psychology Department. We developed an exploratory study of students’ needs in a writing intensive experimental psychology course (Psych 250). I helped to gather data collected through the Hunter Reading/Writing Center. I also provided additional discipline-specific tutoring services throughout the year, with the intention of gaining a better understanding of areas in which students in Psychology needed greater support. I hope to continue to follow through with this project and utilize my experience in teaching the course next year, along with the information I gathered through my fellowship this year, to support the Psychology Department in developing a discipline-specific tutoring program for Psych 250.

Amy Vogel-Eyny

Amy Vogel-Eyny is a PhD candidate in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, and as a Hunter College WAC Fellow she was assigned to work with both the Biology Department and the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Her classroom assignment with the Biology Department consisted of advising students at all stages of their scientific research paper (i.e., developing a thesis, searching for resources, constructing an annotated bibliography, developing an outline, etc.). She also collaborated with The Nurses Writing Project, a nurse-specific e-mentoring service, to advance their research initiative by delineating their research goals, by obtaining IRB approval for the project, and by presenting their unique writing model at academic conferences.