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WAC Fellows 2017-2018
Sumru Atuk
Sumru Atuk is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She earned an MA at Bogazici (Bosphorus) University, Turkey. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, her dissertation project, Politics of Femicide: “Woman” Making and Women Killing in Turkey, investigates the institutional, discursive, and legal practices that maximize women’s precarity, promote hierarchical gender relations, and justify violence against women. As a WAC Fellow, Sumru worked with students of the Women and Gender Studies Department at Hunter College. She assisted the students in organizing academic essays, outlining ideas, developing arguments and research questions, and so forth. Thanks to the overlap between her academic interests and her WAC appointment, she also had the chance of assisting students in integrating the course material and feminist theories in their papers. She also gave an introductory comprehensive workshop on general rules of academic writing.
Isabel Dominguez Seoane
As a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Hunter College, I tutored students of Spanish from almost every level (from the Spanish requirements to Master’s level). I created and led several workshops on Summarizing as a Writing Strategy in the Hunter College Writing Center, and delivered in-class workshops on quotation and citation . As a part of a team formed by Rebeca Pineda, Pablo Garcia and myself, I participated in the creation of an undergraduate Student Writing in Spanish Conference, Nuestras investigaciones y lecturas, featuring 24 student presenters and 3 faculty presenters from colleges across CUNY and from a local high school. Encouraged by my experience as a CUNY WAC Fellow, I have changed my praxis as professor and as student. I delivered a workshop in my department at the Graduate Center on abstracting (how to read a call for papers, how to write an abstract, and how to attend a conference) for my colleagues from earlier years, and a second workshop on Teaching Spanish in the different CUNY colleges. My research and dissertation are on representations of the Balkan war in Spanish Literature.
Pablo García Martínez
In the academic year 2017-2018, I was a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College, where I also acted as WAC Fellows Coordinator of services to the department provided by myself and two other assigned Fellows. We provided Spanish Writing Tutoring, regular workshops on academic writing issues, and consultation with faculty in the department’s Spanish Program. I oversaw departmental communication concerning the Fellows’ services and their implementation. Improvements to WAC relations with Romance Languages included establishing a faculty contact on the department’s Curriculum Committee and expanding opportunities to introduce our services directly to classes at the beginning of the semester, which resulted in a dramatic increase in tutoring usage over the student use recorded the previous year. After introducing to the department last year the idea of a Spanish Student Writing Conference, we succeeded this Spring in realizing the project, and the conference, Nuestras investigaciones y lecturas, took place on May 5th in the Hunter College Writing Center, with student presenters from Hunter, John Jay and City College, and a plenaria by the Dean of the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education at City College.
I successfully defended my dissertation and received my degree in the Spring term.
Julie Hecht
Julie Hecht is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology. She is based at Hunter College under the supervision of Dr. Diana Reiss. Her PhD research focuses on the behavior, welfare, and cognition of companion animals, specifically cats. She aims to expand what we know about companion animals while simultaneously bringing animal lovers into the scientific process through citizen science. She is a published science writer, and is behind the Dog Spies blog on Scientific American.
During her time as a WAC fellow, Julie presented to Hunter faculty at ACERT (Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching) about incorporating science writing and writing for the web in class activities and assignments. Julie also assisted the Human Biology Program and Biology 250, both writing intensive courses, with workshops, tutorials, and faculty consultation.
Juliana Karras-Jean Gilles
Juliana Karras-Jean Gilles provided faculty and student consultation to the Human Biology Capstone program. She discussed/ consulted on with faculty the structure and function of capstone projects; areas of support required by students completing capstone projects; approach taken in each course regarding completion of capstone; expectations for support in most needed areas regarding the writing process; importance of structure and form in the scientific approach to writing; need for descriptive and detailed grading/assignment rubrics; and long-term goals and interests of students to help structure function and focus of WAC Fellowship areas of support. Workshops with students covered: scientific style of writing; the format used for empirical work in the style of American Psychological Association (APA); form and function of APA style covering overall organization of content, citation approach, and rationale for consistent, specific writing style; the process of conducting empirical literature searches; an overview of how to identify high-quality, substantive empirical research; the process of comparing and contrasting empirical sources to determine the best fit for a research project; and tips for how to methodically narrow a search to yield optimal articles. Ms. Karras-Jean Gilles also provided in-person support to students in focused, individualized feedback on drafts of their final written projects. Topics covered in tutoring: approaches to scientific writing; interpretation of assignments; value of set writing styles; and how to structure and organize content within empirical reviews.
Ms. Karras Jean-Gilles defended her dissertation and attained her degree in the Fall of 2017 and has accepted a post-doc appointment at UCLA.
Sean Nolan
My dissertation, “Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry,” focuses on aesthetic responses to the epistemological challenges of modernity to the utility of art in the poetry of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and several other Romantic-era poets of the laboring classes. The Romantic preoccupation with how best to marry “natural thoughts with natural diction,” as Coleridge put it, remains an urgent pedagogical task in our own time. As a WAC fellow, I developed and revised Hunter’s English 120 curriculum and organized and led seminars addressing a wide range of challenges faced by both instructors and students. With faculty, I conducted seminars on constructing scaffolded writing assignments, responding to student writing, and creating rubrics for writing instructors teaching English 120 and 220 at Hunter. With students, I've worked both as a general writing mentor and have led seminars focusing on challenges faced by English Language Learners in the classroom, as well as seminars geared towards overcoming writer's block, “impostor syndrome,” and following the subjects and generating research topics that inspire sincere interest.
WAC has left an unmistakable imprint on my approaches to teaching literature and composition. Engaging learners and writers, I encourage students to cultivate their scholarly interests through frequent low stakes writing assignments, oral presentations, collaborative peer review activities, comments-to-comments-style revisions to essay drafts, and excursions outside the classroom, either to some of New York City’s myriad cultural landmarks, or by implementing a “peripatetic classroom.” Fostering an inclusive classroom environment is fundamental to my teaching, and CUNY’s diverse student body has enhanced my understanding of the importance of WAC principles to meet diverse student needs.
Alison Parks
In my role as the WAC fellow for Political Science, I consulted with the faculty and students of the department. I held weekly office hours during which I met with students ranging from those in introductory courses to those completing an Honors thesis. I was invited to give an interactive workshop on How to Write for Political Science in a 300-level course in which students dissected a published political science article, and for which I created a worksheet to help the students brainstorm their own research question. In the first term of my WAC Fellow service, I also transcribed tutor-generated texts for a qualitative study of Hunter College Writing Center tutoring.
Rebeca Pineda Burgos
During this year as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow I focused on finishing and defending my thesis proposal. I also presented my research in two international conferences -Seminario Internacional Cultura, Violencia y Poder en la Venezuela (post)chavista, Universidad de Lisboa, and XXXVI International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Barcelona. In addition, I worked on two articles—a scholarly book chapter and a peer-reviewed article—both currently “under review. I have been selected for a Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-19 Academic Year.
During this year as a WAC Fellow I attended weekly meetings with the college WAC Coordinators and Fellows, provided tutoring and workshops for students, attendance for tutoring more than doubling in the Spring term,and with the other WAC Fellows serving the Spanish Program in the Hunter Romance Languages Department, Isabel Dominguez Seoane and Pablo García Martinez, organized a Student Conference, “Nuestras investigaciones y lecturas,” which was attended and featured academic writing by students from different Spanish departments of CUNY and was organized in four tables, from researches on Latin American Literature and Cinema, to Spanish Literature and Fiction Writing. The event, which took place in the Writing Center at Hunter College, also featured two keynote speakers from CUNY.
Stephanie Porcelli
Stephanie Porcelli offered the services of a WAC Fellow to the Italian Program in the Romance Languages Department. She held workshops and individual tutoring sessions for students on reading strategies, paper organization, disciplinary style, Italian phrases commonly used in argumentative papers, and annotation in Italian. Her research is on affect and history in Italian fiction. In January, she gave birth to Angelica Joyce Hurd.
Luke Reynolds
The Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow in Hunter College’s History Department, Luke Reynolds consulted with full-time and part-time faculty on their writing assignments and on writing-related issues raised in meetings with students. He led workshops for students at all levels on Chicago Manual Style footnoting and citation, and on research methodologies. Tutorials with student writers covered a range of topics, including generating paper-appropriate ideas, finding sources, footnotes and citations, grammar and style, thesis development for history papers, structure, and understanding and addressing instructor feedback. His graduate research is on the Battle of Waterloo as a phenomenon in British military history and historical culture.
Almudena Vidoretta
I have been working in support of the Spanish Concentration in Translation, which is becoming a BA. Services provided: research on New York non-profit organizations for future collaborations, translation internships, and community-based learning; curricular development in the frame of the project Languages for the Global Workforce (the goal of is to equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary for using Spanish, Russian and/or Chinese in the global marketplace), partnering with the CUNY National Language Center and the Foreign Language Council, including counseling on how to apply Writing Across the Curriculum Pedagogy to the Program objectives and the design of 300-level Spanish courses (two versions of SPAN 371 Spanish for the Global Workforce. Audiovisual Translation and Terminology Management, a prerequisite for an internship provided by the NYC Department of Transportation as well as non-profit organizations such as New York Repertorio Español and Teatro Círculo); adaptation of a Department of Transportation Glossary for English-into-Spanish Translators; design of Spanish activities for the Department of Transportation Internships; student support for their current internships; i.e., translating subtitles for New York Teatro Repertorio Español and Teatro Círculo; design of a Spanish 312 Syllabus (advance writing) for Translation students; design of writing activities for Spanish Grammar for English Speakers (Span 311 and 312); helping to organize Performing Siglo de Oro in New York City, a public literary event featuring Dr. Diana Conchado, with Teatro Circulo collaboration, and “TRANSLATING BURP: GASTRONOMICAL WRITINGS: A Multicultural Dialogue About Food and Translation,” a public event on translation with Mercedes Cebrián (Author), Adrián Izquierdo (Editor /Hunter College Faculty) and Ulises Gonzales (Lehman College /Chatos Inhumanos Publisher).
Erik Wallenberg
As the writing fellow for the Thomas Hunter Honors Program for the 2017-2018 academic year, my duties were primarily working with students to improve their writing. While I mostly worked with students face-to-face and online on writing assignments for classes in the program, I also worked with students on applications for graduate school, internships, and funding opportunities. I attended program-wide events in the Fall and Spring and emailed faculty teaching honors courses requesting to speak with their classes, to introduce myself and connect with students.
Finally, I read the applications and writing samples of students applying to the THHP each semester, offering feedback to the program administrators on who might benefit from help with their writing, and then meeting with those students in preparation for their entrance into and work in the program.
I am a PhD Candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. I study modern US environmental history. Besides serving as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Hunter College, I teach global history and environmental history at Brooklyn College. My research is on the work of non-traditional and radical theatre that addresses environmental concerns and examines the relationship between society and the natural world. I examine theater groups connected to social movements including farmworkers, the civil rights movement, and anti-war organizing , and consider the way each group addresses environmental concerns.
