Faculty Directory - Full Time

Professor Alexander holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and a Ph.D. in American Literature from The University at Buffalo with major study in the nineteenth-century roots of modern and postmodern literature, theory/continental philosophy, and science and literature. His current scholarly interests involve Conceptual Poetry, media studies, and social systems theory, but he also writes on the pedagogy of the difficult text. In addition to Basic Writing and Composition, he teaches ENG270: Introduction to Poetry, ENN198: Creative Writing, ENG260: The Novel, ENG271: Poetry Writing, and Liberal Arts 200. He is faculty co-mentor of the student Creative Writing Club.
Schools Attended: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (B.A. in English Literature), Boston University (M.A. in Creative Writing), and The University at Buffalo (M.A. and Ph.D. in American Literature)
Books and Projects: Panda (2010): Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 by Tan Lin: Chinese Edition (4 vols., 2010)
Areas of Specialization: Modernism and Modernity, Postmodern Poetry, Theory/Continental Philosophy
Favorite Quote: "Intoxication is a number." -- Baudelaire, journals
Favorite Composition Topics: Graffiti; the culture of the American workplace; fast food and the industrial food system
Authors, Artists, Critics and Theorists I Teach: Bertolt Brecht, Susan Glaspell, Walt Whitman, Kamau Brathwaite, Georges Perec, Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Robert Fitterman (Writing Through Literature); Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath (Introduction to Poetry); Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Toni Morrison, William James, Sigmund Freud (The Novel); Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and OULIPO, Christian Bök, K. Silem Mohammad, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Rob Pruitt, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Fitterman, and Nick Thurston (Creative Writing)
Methodologies I Teach: Close reading and explication de texte, essentials of literary theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism and semiotics), historical reading and the New Historicism, poetics
 

I moved to New York City in time to start my high school education in Brooklyn, at Erasmus Hall High School. I received my Bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and my Masters and Ph.D. from Columbia. I’ve been working at LaGuardia for a long, long time now, and I’ve taught many courses—all of the composition courses, naturally, as well as Drama, the Novel (to which I add a few of the Victorian works that are part of my specialty), Shakespeare, the Short Story, and LIB 200, the Liberal Arts and Sciences seminar.
As a result of the Design for Learning and First Year Academy projects, I learned how to use Blackboard and internet materials and tools in my courses. I am very active in university politics as a faculty representative on the CUNY Faculty Senate; I’m the Vice Chair of the University Faculty Senate I edit the UFS Senate Digest; and I am the faculty representative on the CUNY Board of Trustees Committee on Policy, Program and Research.. I was recently elected to the American Association of University Professors National Council and am on the AAUP Governance Committee. I edited the Victorian Studies Bulletin for 14 years. Recently, I’ve presented at conferences on being a Victorian scholar at a community college, on the pedagogical uses of Blackboard,, on assessment, and on academic freedom. When I’m not teaching, reading or grading papers, I run, practice yoga, try to meditate, watch lots of baseball games (especially the Philadelphia Phillies), and study French at the Alliance Francaise.
Schools Attended: Brooklyn College, B.A.; Columbia University, M.A., Ph.D.
Area of Specialization: Victorian Studies, Composition, Pedagogy and Testing.
Favorite Quote: “There is no absolute knowledge; all information is imperfect." Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
Authors I teach: Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, The Difference Engine and Bram Stoker, Dracula (for LIB 200); Duong Thu Huong, Memories of Pure Spring (for ENG 101); Great Expectations or Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea (for the Novel); poems by Marvell, Shakespeare and Robert Hayden, stories by Poe, Carver and Oates (for ENG 102); Antony and Cleopatra (for Shakespeare)
The author I’d do if I didn’t always run out of time—Gerard Manley Hopkins
 

Nancy Berke received her Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate School. She is the author of Women Poets on the Left (University Press of Florida, 2001). Her scholarly focus is on modern American poetry, women's studies, cultural studies, and politics and literature. Recent articles and reviews have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics, The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Women's Review of Books, and The American Book Review. A chapter she has introduced and edited, "Radical Moderns: American Women Poets on the Left, " is included in the critical anthology Gender in Modernism, (University of Illinois Press, 2007).
 

Since 1974 Professor Boris has taught in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College , where she received the title of Professor of English in September 1996. In addition, she is the founding director of WordsWorth Associates, Inc., which provides writing skills programs for attorneys and other business professionals in the United States and in Europe . She has published one book and numerous articles in 3 areas: on Shakespeare, on the teaching of writing, and on legal writing.
Schools Attended: Hunter College (B.A.) and Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana (M.A. and Ph.D.)
Area of Specialization: Composition, Drama, and Shakespeare
Favorite Quote: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep." Tempest (4.1. 156-57).
Website: http://faculty.lagcc.cuny.edu/eboris/
 

Linda Chandler joined the English Department at LaGuardia in the fall of 2005. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley and she is currently working on her dissertation "Keeping Home: Another Look at Domesticity in Antebellum America." She has presented papers at various conferences such as the American Literature Association's Annual Convention, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Annual Conference, and the Northeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature, to name a few. She currently teaches ENA 099, ENG 101, and ENG102, and she looks forward to teaching a literature elective in the future. During her free time she is either reading books or losing at Monopoly to her children.
Schools attended: University of Pennsylvania (B.S.E.); Stanford University (M.A.); University of CA, Berkeley (abd).
Area of Specialization: American Literature before 1800; Nineteenth Century American Literature.
Favorite Quote: "Make better ripples in the world" - Melanie Lewis
 

J. Elizabeth Clark teaches a range of courses in the Department of English including: ENG 099, ENG 101, the "Fighting for Our Rights" Liberal Arts Cluster, Creative Writing, Introduction to Poetry, and LIB 200: Cultural Studies of Medicine. Many of her courses focus on the political nature of art and writing in the democratic tradition. She currently serves as one of the Directors of Composition for the Department of English with responsibility for English 101. She is active in the ePortfolio and Capstone projects at the college, regularly leading faculty professional development seminars through the Center for Teaching & Learning.
Outside of LaGuardia, Dr. Clark is a published poet and writer. Her poetry appears in journals such as: the Paterson Literary Review, the Santa Clara Review, the Comstock Review, Ars Medica, and WOMB.
Her scholarly work in the areas of medical humanities, pedagogy, ePortfolio and digital rhetoric has appeared in journals such as: Journal of Medical Humanities, The Minnesota Review, Radical Teacher, Journal of Basic Writing, and AAC&U's Peer Review.
Outside of LaGuardia, Dr. Clark regularly presents on ePortfolio and digital rhetoric. She serves on the editorial boards of College Composition & Communication (2010-2013) and Radical Teacher (1998-present).
Schools Attended: Lycoming College (B.A.), Binghamton University (M.A. and Ph.D.)
Area of Specialization: ePortfolio, Digital Rhetoric, Contemporary U.S. Poetry, AIDS Literature, Political Literature, Latino/a Literature, Feminist Theory & Queer Theory.
Authors I like to teach: Authors I like to teach: Walt Whitman, Carol Maso, Marie Howe, Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, Martin Espada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Barrio, Demetria Martinez, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Randy Shilts, Leslea Newman, Rafael Campo, Gloria Anzaldua, Nikky Finney.
Conferences:

• "Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Digital Imperative," The International Conference on Teaching and Learning, Jacksonville, Florida (14-18 April 2008).
• "Wrestling with Writing: Using ePortfolios to Enhance and Assess Basic Writing" with Professor Marisa Klages, Dr. Heidi Johnsen, and Dr. Kenneth Monteith at the Making Connections ePortfolios, Integrative Learning, and Assessment Conference, LaGuardia Community College (10 April 2008).
• "Introduction to ePortfolio," a half-day workshop for the Making Connections ePortfolios, Integrative Learning, and Assessment Conference with Dr. Max Rodriguez and Professor Nancy Gross, LaGuardia Community College (10 April 2008).
• "Reclaiming the Classroom: Two Year Colleges and Innovative Self-Assessment" with Professor Marisa Klages, Professor Linda Chandler, and Dr. Michelle Pacht at the College Composition and Communication Conference, New Orleans, LA (3-5 April 2008).
• "First-Year Academies: Facilitating Engagement and Success in the First Year of College: An Update," with Dean Paul Arcario at the 2008 Community College Futures Assembly, Orlando, Florida (26-29 January 2008).
• "Do Portfolios Really Need the 'e'?" National Council of Teachers of English Convention (NCTE) ISTE Session, New York City, NY (16 November 2007).

Awards: 2008 Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology. International Conference on Teaching and Learning, sponsored by Florida Community College, Jacksonville, Fl.
Consultations:

• "ePortfolio Faculty Development Workshop," Long Island University's Writing Program (28 May 2008).
• "Local Practice, Global Impact: ePortfolios and the Emerging World of Digital Rhetoric," AAC & U's Staff Development Program, Washington, D.C. (26 February 2008).

Website:http://faculty.lagcc.cuny.edu/eclark/  

Dr. Barbara Comins, Professor of English, began her professional life as a cellist playing in the New Jersey Symphony, the New York Pops, the New York Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and orchestras backing Tony Bennett, Benny Goodman, Henry Mancini, Barry Manilow, Luciano Pavarotti, Doc Severinsen, Frank Sinatra, Ben Vereen, and many others.
Winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities dissertation award, she earned her Ph.D. in English as a fellowship student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writing includes pieces in the New York Times, Poetry Calendar, Allegro, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and the Edith Wharton Review. Her essays “‘That Queer Sea’: Elizabeth Bishop and the Sea,” “‘Shuddering Insights’: Elizabeth Bishop and Surprise,” and “‘Then the Theatre…Changed’: Musical Frames for Wallace Stevens” appeared in the anthologies Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place, “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, and Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading Over the Lines. With the British composer John Marson, she co-wrote the musical Getaway.
At LaGuardia Community College, she teaches freshman composition; creative writing; literature; the college’s capstone liberal arts seminar “Humanism, Science, and Technology,” and the course she created “Cultural Identity in American Literature.”
 

Richard Dragan currently teaches Basic Writing, Composition I and II. In Spring 2007, he taught American Literature II, a survey of American Literature since 1865. Previous to LaGuardia, he taught a two-semester sequence on Great Works (with a World Literature focus) at Baruch College for several years. While in graduate school, he worked extensively in business and technical journalism publishing hundreds of articles for national magazines and websites. His work has been translated into 11 languages in print and online. Additionally, he has taught web design and computer technology at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education for over a decade.
He is busy revising his dissertation on the use of recent science for aesthetic effects in the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers. He is collaborating on a cognitive science cluster for 2009 that will bridge 'the two cultures' of science and the humanities. He is circulating a manuscript of short stories, Words for a Mood, and is working on a new novel.
An avid amateur classical and jazz guitarist, he continues to arrange music, especially jazz standards and the music of J. S. Bach.
Schools Attended: Oberlin College (B.A. in English and Minor in History), Columbia University (M.A. in English and Comparative Literature, MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction), The Graduate Center / CUNY (Ph.D. in English). Areas of Specialization: 20th/21st Century British and American Literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, Science and Literature, James Joyce, Anglophone Literature, Creative Writing—Fiction, Journalism. A Favorite Quote: "What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic." --James Joyce, "Ithaca," Ulysses (1922).
Authors I Have Taught At LaGuardia: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Ha Jin, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Alice Munro, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Wright, Derek Walcott.
Recent and Upcoming Conference Papers:

• "Falling Men: Realistic and Postmodern Terror and Wonder in DeLillo and McEwan's Recent Fiction and James Marsh's Man on Wire." Don DeLillo in the Twenty-First Century Conference, Don DeLillo Society, Louisville, KY, February 2009.
• "Close Reading Matters: Explicating American Literature by Urban Community College Students." Close Reading Conference, NYCEA, St. Bonaventure University, Buffalo, NY, October 2008.
• "Darwin on the Balloon: Reading Evolutionary Science in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love." Revolution and Literature / Evolution and Literature Conference, NYCEA, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, April 2007.
• "Leaving the Bronx: Don DeLillo's Modern and Postmodern Cities in His Early Fiction." Literature and the City Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2006.
• "Mind-Body Problems: Science and Triangulating Desire in the Work of Richard Powers and Jeanette Winterson. " Locating Love Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2004.

Contributing Editor: PC Magazine
 

Professor Tom Fink--member of LaGuardia's English Department since 1981--regularly teaches ENG 101, 102, 270 (Introduction to Poetry), and Introduction to Literary Study, and sometimes teaches the Teaching Practicum for CUNY Grad students. He is the author of two books of criticism, including "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickison University Press, 2001),and six books of poetry, most recently Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh HawkPress, 2008) and Autopsy Turvy, a book of poems coauthored with Maya Diablo Mason (Meritage Press, 2010), as well as an e-chapbook and two chapbooks that appeared in 2009. In 2011, Marsh Hawk Press will publish Peace Conference. Fink is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007) and Literature Around the Globe (Dubuque,IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1994). His poem, "Yinglish Strophes IX," was chosen by Heather McHugh and David Lehman for The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner's).He has published over 180 reviews, interviews, and articles in numerous journals, including Contemporary Literature, Barrow Street, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Exchange Values,Jacket, Minnesota Review, Milk, Otoliths, Slope, Talisman, Twentieth Century Literature, Verse, and Word for/ Word.
Schools Attended: Princeton University (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A., Ph.D.)
Area of Specialization: Contemporary U.S. Poetry
Books of Poetry:

• Clarity and Other Poems. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2008.
• No Appointment Necessary. Chicago: Moria Poetry, 2006.
• After Taxes. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2004.
• Gossip: a Book of Poems. New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2001.
• Surprise Visit. New York: Domestic Press, 1993.

Books of Criticism:

• "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. (Includes analysis of the work of Gloria Anzaldua, Melvin Dixon, Denise Duhamel, Martin Espada, Carolyn Forche, Joseph Lease, Stephen Paul Miller, Thylias Moss, and John Yau.)
• The Poetry of David Shapiro. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Co-Ed. with Joseph Lease. "Burning Interiors": David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Co-Ed. with Tuzyline Jita Allan. Literature around the Globe. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1994.

Poetry Chapbooks:

• Generic Whistle-Stop. Brooklyn, NY: Portable Press at YoYo Labs, 2009.
• Staccato Landmark. Chicago: Beard of Bees, 2006.

Articles:

• "David Shapiro." Contemporary Jewish American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 542-8.
• "Ammons: Garbage." 11-2; "Mark Strand." 703-5. Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Eric L. Haralson. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
• "Between/After Language Poetry and the New York School." Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. (2002): 23-26.
• "Joseph Lease and Thomas Fink: Narrative and Critique." The Possum Pouch (Fall/Winter 2002-2003). 38.2 (Summer 2003): 89-92.
• "David Shapiro's 'Possibilist' Poetry." Jacket 23 (November 2003).
• "Poetry, Charm, and More: Billy Collins and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge." Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 27 (Winter 2003): 100-107.
• "'No Other Sentence Could Have Followed This': Ron Silliman's Tjanting." Titanic Operas, Folio Two (2004).
• Entries on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (42-43), Robert Creeley (107-109), Denise Duhamel (139), and John Yau (534-535). The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry. Ed. Burt Kimmelman. New York: Checkmark Books, 2005.
• "Interview with Sheila E. Murphy." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews. Ed Tom Beckett. Rockhampton, Australia: Otoliths, 2007. 73-87. Originally published on-line, Mar. 2005.
• "Interview with Stephen Paul Miller." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews. Ed Tom Beckett. Rockhampton, Australia: Otoliths, 2007. 203-229. Originally published on-line, Oct. 2005.
• "Interview with Michael Heller." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Second XV Interviews. Ed Tom Beckett. Rockhampton, Australia: Otoliths, 2007. 27-36. Originally published on-line, Jan. 2006.
• "Andrew Joron's Fathom." 26 E (2006): 221-230.
• "Interview with Denise Duhamel and Nick Carbo." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The Second XV Interviews. Ed Tom Beckett. Rockhampton, Australia: Otoliths, 2007. 243-52. Originally published on-line, Sept. 2006.
• "On Geoffrey O'Brien's Red Sky Café." Denver Quarterly 41.1 (2006): 19-22. With Crag Hill. "Interview" (of Tom Beckett). In Tom Beckett. Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006. St. Helena, CA: Meritage Press, 2006. 162-179.
• "Transgression, Confession, and Flagrant Multiplicity in the Poetry of Timothy Liu." Slope 24 (Winter 2007).
• "Interview with Joseph Lease." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S (August 2007).
• "Uncanny Narrative in Shapiro's A Burning Interior." "Burning Interiors": David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. 123-137.
• "Interview with Noah Eli Gordon.". E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S (Oct. 2007).
• "The Poetry of Questions." Jacket 34 (Oct. 2007).
• "Poetry Interrogating Itself: Sheila E. Murphy's The Case of the Lost Objective (Case)." Critiphoria 1 (Feb. 2008).
• "Interview with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs." Galatea Resurrects 10 (July 2008).
• "The Poetry of Mark Young." In Mark Young, Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008. Ed. Thomas Fink. St. Helena, CA: Meritage, 2008. 17-36.
• "Introduction." Jack Lynch, Manhattan Man and Other Poems. New York: Reed & Quill P, 2008. 1-5.

Interview:

• Tom Beckett. "Interview with Thomas Fink." E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews. Ed Tom Beckett. Rockhampton, Australia: Otoliths, 2007. 29-47. Originally published online, Jan. 2005.

Poetry Anthology Inclusions:

• The First Hay(na)ku Anthology. Ed. Jean Vengua & Mark Young. St. Helena, CA: Meritage P, 2005. 27-28.
• Collaborative poems with Timothy Liu in Saints of Hysteria: A Half Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Ed. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull P, 2007. 246-247.
• Long Island Sounds Anthology. Ed. Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan. Southampton, NY: North Sea Poetry Scene P, 2007. 119-120.
• The Best American Poetry. Ed. Heather McHugh and David Lehman. New York: Scribner's, 2007. 35.
• Collaborative poem with Tom Beckett in >2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry. Ed. Sheila E. Murphy and M.L. Weber. Colorado Springs, CO: SugarMule.com P, 2007. 208-211.
• The Second Hay(na)ku Anthology. Ed. Jean Vengua & Mark Young. St. Helena, CA: Meritage P, forthcoming, 2008.

 

Kristen Gallagher was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. She received her B.A. from University of Pennsylvania in 1991 with a major in Biological Basis of Behavior and worked with Dr. Ed Pugh researching color vision. After working in vision science at University of California-Davis for two years, Professor Gallagher realized she preferred to be a poet. She then returned to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania College of General Studies where she studied Modern and Contemporary American Poetry with Alan Filreis, Bob Perelman, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. In 1995, she was a founding member of The Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. From 2000-2005, she was the editor of both Rust Talks, a Buffalo-area reading and discussion series and newsletter for poetry, and Handwritten Press (poetry chapbooks). She currently co-edits WIG Journal of the Arts with Tim Shaner, and Truck Books (poetry) with Christopher Alexander. Her first poetry book We Are Here came out in 2010. At LaGuardia, she serves as the Chair of the Creative Writing Committee, co-directs the Faculty Seminar “Teaching the City” with Dr. Karen Miller from Social Science, and leads the series “Collective Translation,” an ongoing project where students, faculty, and staff from the college work in collectives to translate modern American poems into as many languages as possible. In addition to ENG 099: Basic Writing, she teaches ENN 198: Creative Writing Urban Studies, Liberal Arts 200: Haunted Media, ENG 270: Introduction to Poetry, ENG 271 Creative Writing Poetry, ENG 220: The Seminar in Teaching Writing, and ENG 102: Introduction to Literature. Poetry Chapbooks:

• Poems Got Watching the News, with Christopher Alexander, New York: Cheap Art (2008).
• Our National Catastrophe, with Christopher Alexander, New York: Cheap Art (2007)
• No Goal, Chicago: Rubba Ducky (2006).

Articles:

• "Affective Labor: Teaching Writing in the New Economy," with Christopher Alexander, In Transit 3 (October 2008).
• "Some Limits of Ratio; or, Aesthetic Has No Goal," Crayon 5 (September 2008).
• "Neoliberal Poetry," with Christopher Alexander and Matthias Regan, Crayon 5 (September 2008).
• "Pairing Freire: Teaching 'The Banking Concept of Education' with the History of Open Admissions at CUNY," Journal of the Paulo Freire Institute Online, Winter 2007, Vol. 2. Issue 2. http://web.gseis.ucla.edu/~pfi/Journal_PFI/ 
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• "Book As World: A Brief History of handwritten press" HOW2 (poetry and poetics), Special Issue: Small Press Forum (2006).

Interviews:

• "Conversation with Kristen Gallagher," CA Conrad, Philly Sound (September 2008).
• "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen,"Kristen Gallagher, Farah Griffin and Michael Magee, Combo 1:1 (1998).
• Poetry Inclusions in Magazines and Journals
• Featured Poet, Primary Writing (January 2006).
• Poems have appeared in Model Homes (November 2008); LaGuardia Women's Studies Newsletter (Spring 2008); Ecopoetics 4 (2007); Combo 16 (2006); Chain Arts 15 (2005); Mirage 4 Periodical (October 2005); Antennae 8 (May 2004); Combo 14 (May 2004); Art Voice (30, October 2003); Combo 12 (2003); Mirage 4 Periodical (April 2003); kenning 12 (2002); Kiosk 1 (2002); Boog City (2001); Combo 8 (2001); Combo 4 (1999); Ixnay 3 (1998); American Poetry Review 46 (3), (1998); Combo 1 (1998).

Editor:

• WIG: Writing at Work, periodical, 2004-present. handwritten press (poetry chapbooks), bi-annual, 1999-present. http://handwritten.org 
• Rust Talks Newsletter (poetry and correspondence), bi-monthly, 1999-2004.
• The Form of Our Uncertainty: a Tribute to Gil Ott (festschrift), Chax Press, 2000.

 

Originally from Chile, Dr. Ximena Gallardo C. is a gender and film scholar who has published and presented widely on issues of representation in popular culture. She is currently working on a comprehensive study of women and gender in science fiction cinema entitled She Came from Outer Space. Dr. Gallardo is also Feminism editor for Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, and the co-chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area for the Southwest and Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association. Her first book, Alien Woman (Continuum, 2004), a study of the representation of women and gender in the Alien film series, was co-authored with C. Jason Smith. Schools Attended: Louisiana State University.
Area of Specialization: British literature, Gender Theory and Film Theory, Ethnic Literatures, and Composition.
Favorite Quote: "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -- Catherine Aird
Authors I teach: Whenever I teach essays, novels, and short stories, I usually choose at least one article or essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café or Mama Day, and at least one work by Octavia Butler: “Bloodchild,” Dawn, or Wild Seed. When I teach drama, I always include at least one play by William Shakespeare (my usual choices are Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear), and several selections from the following: Los Vendidos by Luis Valdez, Dutchman by Imamu Amiri Baraka, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith, Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick, Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. My choices for poetry vary enormously, but I tend to fall back on one or more of these poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Plath, Angelou, Piercy. Books: Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. Co-author. New York: Continuum, 2004. Winner of the 2005 Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Association Book Award. Articles:

• "Happily Ever After: Harry Potter and the Quest for the Domestic." Co-author. Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatole. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009.
• "The Alien Film Series." Co-author. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vol. II. Ed. Robin Reid. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008: 3-5.
• "Feminism." An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett. Ed. Andrew M. Butler. Oxford: Greenwood, 2007. 149-152.
• "Sexism." An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett. Ed. Andrew M. Butler. Oxford: Greenwood, 2007. 331-333.
• "Alien: The History of Xenosex." Den of Geek. Dec. 19 2007.
• "Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, and Alien Love: An Interview with Marleen S. Barr." Co-author. Fem-scape, a special edition of Reconstruction. 5.4 (Winter 2005). n.p. 5 pp.
• "How the Online Classroom Changed the Way I Teach." In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning 1.1 (Fall 2005): 23-27.
• "'Who Are You?': Alien/Woman as Post-human Subject in Alien Resurrection." Post.human.ous, a special edition of Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 4.3 (Summer 2004). n.p. 13 pp.
• "Cinderfella: J. K. Rowling's Wily Web of Gender." Co-author. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatole. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. 191-205.

Editions:

• Fem-scape, a special edition of Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 5.4 (Winter 2005).
• Post.human.ous, a special edition of Reconstruction. Co-editor. Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 4.3 (Summer 2004).

Websites: LaGuardia Community College's 2007-2008 Common Reading Companion Website to An Inconvenient Truth. Content manager. LaGuardia Community College. 2007-2008.
 

Gail has been a full-time member of the English Department since 1986. In her early years at LaGuardia she was a full-time teacher and a full-time student. Thanks to an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship, she was able to complete her Ph.D. in English at CUNY Graduate Center. She feels tremendous admiration for LaGuardia's "juggling" students.
Gail teaches a wide variety of courses at LaGuardia including Basic Writing, Composition I, Writing through Literature and The Novel in the college's Honors program. She has been a member of many LaGuardia Learning Community faculty teams. In 1998, LaGuardia's Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, the national honor society, granted her honorary membership to acknowledge her excellence as a teacher. In 2003 she was named a Semi-Finalist for the David R. Pierce Faculty Technology Award from the American Association of Community Colleges.
With Bret Eynon, she launched In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning. The first issue was published in Fall 2005. She continues to serve as Editor of the college's journal.
Schools Attended: George Washington University (B.A.); SUNY at Oneonta (M.A.); Graduate School and University Center, CUNY (Ph.D.)
Favorite Quote: "It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
 

Stafford Grégoire earned his Baccalaureate at Hunter College (1992) and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (May 2004). His specialization is in Nineteenth Century African American and American Literature. He is revising his dissertation, Blacks Seeing Seeing Blacks: Surveillance and The Gaze in the Works of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown for publication. This work explores the nexus between Foucault’s theory of surveillance and Lacan’s refinement of the theories of the Gaze. He is interested in the depiction of the visual forces of the “look,” “the gaze,” or surveillance, which reify the status of African Americans as diminished beings. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at LaGuardia Community College CUNY and working on a newer, though still related field, Hip-Hop Fiction or contemporary African American crime novels. He has recently presented two papers on the subject in New Mexico and The Bronx. “Hip-Hop Scribes: Uncomfortable Truths in Black on White” examined the creation of a new genre of African American or Black Literature outside of the confines of mainstream publishing. “Hip-Hop Scribes: Double-Consciousness Double-Crossed” examines how this new genre is, because of its unique genesis, able to transgress the DuBoisian paradigm of “self-consciousness” in African American Belle Lettres. Previous Academic Honors:

• Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award (1998-1999)
• Summer Mellon Fellowship (1995)
• Graduate Opportunity Fellowship (1992-1994)
• Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship (1990-1992)

 

Dr. Sandra Sellers Hanson is professor and chairperson of the English Department. She holds a B.A. from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa; a Master's Degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison; and a Ph. D. from New York University. Her dissertation was a critical analysis of the novels and poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Before coming to LaGuardia Community College, she taught at Valparaiso University in Indiana, Van Nuys Jr. College in California and Wagner College on Staten Island, New York.
Dr. Hanson also serves as co-chair of the CUNY English Discipline Council.
 

Carlos Hiraldo is a published theorist, book reviewer, and poet. His works include Segregated Miscegenation: on the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the US and Latin American Literary Traditions (Routledge, 2003) and various poems published in national and international journals, such as Fire, Other Poetry, and 3rd Muse. His book reviews have appeared in such journals as Book/Mark, Galatea Resurrects, and Jacket. He teaches Basic Writing, Composition I, Writing through Literature, Introduction to Poetry, Introduction to Short Fiction, Creative Writing, and The Novel. He received his Ph. D. from SUNY at Stony Brook and his scholarship focuses on ethnic studies and other post-colonial issues.
Schools Attended: SUNY at Stony Brook (Ph.D. )
Area of Specialization: Post-Colonial Literature, 20th American Literature, Latino Literature
Favorite Quote: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." - Kurt Vonnegut
Authors I teach: James Baldwin, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Jose Saramago, Amiri Baraka, Julia Alvarez, Fyodor Dostoevsky and etc and etc and etc.
Books: Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions. New York & London: Routledge, 2003.
Editorial:

• Assistant Editor, Transplanting Your Head and Other Feats of the Future. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001.
• Assistant Editor, The Highway of Light and Other Engineering Oddities. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001.
• Co-Editor, SNARK: A Journal of Poetry and Short Fiction, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1997-1999.

Articles:

• The Class of Bukowski: Engaging LaGuardia's Working-Class Students with the Novels of Charles Bukowski. In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal of Teaching and Learning Volume 3, Fall 2008.
• Arroz Frito with Salsa: Asian Latinos and the Future of the United States, Asian American Law Journal Volume 15, May 2008.
• Class in the Class: Sharing Bukowski's Class with Community College Students, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Volume 35, Number 4, May 08.

Poems:

• Fat People Exercising. Other Poetry. Series III, Number 1, Winter 2008.
• Off Sylvia Plath, Bay of Pigs and I Give You A Song. Still Standen: A Celebration of the Poet's Life. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Other Poetry Editions, 2007.
• Kate Winslet. Miracle & Clockwork: The Best of Other Poetry, Series Two, 2005.

Conferences and Presentations:

• Chaired panel on Race and U.S. Literature and Round Table on Poets and Teaching Poetry for North Eastern Modern Language Association Conference in Buffalo, New York. April 10-13, 2008.
• Guest Lecturer, Identity against the Grain: Caribbean Latino Authors and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States. CUNY Graduate Center, New York, October 5th 2007.
• Presented Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Race and Nation in the Americas, 47th Annual Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association at The Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10 – 13, 2005.
  

 

Schools Attended: Brigham Young University (B.A. , M.A.) State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D.)
Area of Specialization: Rhetoric and Composition, Early American Literature, Women's Studies
Favorite Quotes about Writing:

• " . . . with writing, you start where you are, and you usually do it poorly. You just do it-you do it afraid. And something happens. --Anne Lamott
• Few of us make our living from writing, and the concept of writer tends to carry allsorts of cultural baggage, like creative genius and suffering. But if we write regularly, we are writers. I’ve found that students and adult professionals who write get a big boost by acknowledging that they are writers-a surprisingly mysterious and difficult inner adjustment of the mind and feelings. --Peter Elbow
• You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it’s acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they’re alive, sometimes dead. --Margaret Atwood

Articles: Kate Chopin in Vogue: Establishing a Textual Context for A Vocation and a Voice. Rethinking and Rereading Kate Chopin. Ed. Heather Ostman. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.
Conference Presentations:

• The Next Steps in a Difficult Dialogue: Facilitation through a Community of Practice, Society for Values in Higher Education Institute, CT, June 15-20, 2008 (co-presenter).
• Wrestling with Writing: Using ePortfolios to Enhance and Assess Basic Writing Courses, Making Connections: ePortfolios, Integrative Learning and Assessment, LaGuardia CC, CUNY, April 10-12, 2008 (co-presenter).
• The Ethics of High-Stakes Testing in a Basic Writing Class, College English Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, April 13, 2007.
• A Study of High Stakes Testing Practices: The City University of New York and Beyond, Conference on College Composition and Communication, New York, March 22, 2007 (co-presenter).

 

Marisa Klages is an assistant professor in the English Department. She completed her Ph.D with her dissertation "Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: Four Middle English Mystics" in July 2008. Her research interests include Basic Writing, and Assessment. Along with her colleague and co-author, J. Elizabeth Clark, Marisa most recently published an article in the Journal of Basic Writing "New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions." Marisa is currently serving as the Director of Outcomes Assessment for the College and as the Project Director for Global Skills for College Completion, a national grant funded by the Gates Foundation. You’ll most often find Marisa on campus teaching or in her office meeting with students.
Schools Attended: Chatham College (B.A.), West Virginia University (M.A.), West Virginia University (Ph.D.)
Area of Specialization: Composition and Rhetoric, Medieval Literature
Favorite Quote: "Teaching is a political act." ~ Paulo Friere
 

In addition to being a Professor of English at LaGuardia, I am the Director of the Honors Program, and an advisor of the college’s Alpha Theta Phi Chapter of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society. I oversee several national transfer scholarships for the college, and mentor Honors students through major transfer and scholarship applications.
My scholarly work is concerned with the effects of (post)colonialism and globalization on the construction of identity (in particular, racialized ethnicity). With funded from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) Doctoral Fellowship, I completed a study on this subject, with a focus on the relationship between the writing of history and the emergence of subjectivity. I began a study of Asian North American avant-garde poetics and visual arts at New York University, where I held a SSHRCC Postdoctoral Fellowship. My research has been published in scholarly journals as well as arts magazines (and most recently, in an anthology published by Indiana University Press), and has been presented at scholarly conferences in the US, Canada, Belgium and the UK. I am also an avid student of yoga.
Schools Attended: University of Auckland, New Zealand (BA in English and Political Science); University of British Columbia, Canada (MA); Simon Fraser University, Canada (Ph.D.); School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University; New York University (Postdoctoral Fellow, Comparative Literature).
Area of Specialization: Critical theory, postcolonial theory, Asian American cultural studies, queer theory, poetry.
Favorite Quote: "To fray a passage toward the other is a humanly difficult art." Hélène Cixous
Articles:

• "Present Memory: Albert Chobg's Imagining The Past." Out of The Archives: Process and Progress, ed. Sarita See. New York: Asian American Arts Center (forthcoming Fall 2009).
• "'glove's dream': A Short Meditation." Aitia 28.1 (2009): 34-38).
• "Networking a Community Out of Fragmentation" (with J. Chaffee and E. Goodman). Honors in Practice 5 (2009): 161-170.
• "Humanistic Mathematics" (with Dr. Marina Dedlovskaya). Mathematics, Information Technologies, and Education, Volume II. Ed. Sergey Gerasimenko. Orenburg, Russia: Orenburg State UP, 2006. 274-7.
• "At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community?" Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, eds. Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 149-69.
• "Speculations and (Dis)Identification: Notes on Asian Canadian Women Writers." New Scholars-New Visions in Canadian Studies 1.1. Seattle, WA: Canadian Studies Center, University of Washington, 1996. [monograph]

Conference Presentations:

• "A Poetics of Betrayal," Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association, Portland State University, April 19, 2007.
• "'glove's dream.'" Rhetoric, Politics and Ethics conference, University of Ghent, Belgium, April 22, 2005.
• "Reading Between Image and Text in Three Works." Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Hartford, CT, October 18, 2003.
• "Figures of Community." 20th Annual Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, San Francisco, May 9, 2003.
• "Community, Love and Friendship." "The Desire for Dimension: Queer Theory and Asian American Studies" panel organized by the Asian American Literature discussion group. Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco, 29 December 1998.
• "Asian Canadian: A Name (Un)Bound." 15th Annual Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, Honolulu, 26 June 1998.
• Panelist, "History in Asian American Literature: A Roundtable." 20th Annual Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, San Francisco, May 8, 2003.
• Discussant, "Travelling Texts in Contexts: Theorizing the 'International' in Internationalizing Asian American Literary Studies" panel. Annual Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies. Toronto, 30 March 2001.
• Guest lecture, Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. New York University, 2 October 2000.

Fellowships, awards, and grants:

• Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society, New York Region, Horizon Award for New Advisors, 2007.
• Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society, Hallmark Paragon Award for Advisors--International Level, 2008.
• PSC-CUNY 39 Research Award, City University of New York, Spring 2007.
• PSC-CUNY 37 Research Award, City University of New York, Fall 2006.
• PSC-CUNY 36 Research Award, City University of New York, Fall 2005.
• CUNY Faculty Development Grant (with M. Dedlovskaya), Fall 2006.
• Diversity Projects Development Fund Fellowship (with C. Hiraldo), City University of New York, Spring 2005.
• Faculty Fellowship Publications Program, City University of New York, Spring 2005.
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1999-2001.
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 1995-8.

Appointed Offices and Consulting :

• Director, Honors Program, LaGuardia, September 2006-present.
• Faculty Contact Advisor, Alpha Theta Phi Chapter of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society, LaGuardia, February 2006-present.
• Editorial consultant, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

Exhibitions, openings, and performances :

• "Fragmentaries/les Fragmentaires." Laiwan: Livres et Collages, ed. Jack Stanley. Montréal: Gallerie Articule, 1998. 30-43.
• "Yours Truly/La lettre (en)volée. (be) longing, cur. and ed. Mary Sui Yee Wong, trans. Isabelle Chagnon. Montréal: Gallerie Optica, 1998. 9-13, 23-6. Rev. and rpt. as "Yours Truly [II]." West Coast Line 31.3 (Winter 1997-8): 23-7.
• "Preserves." Mixed media installation and poetic text (collaboration with Effie Pow). Earthly Pleasures, curated by Larissa Lai. Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, 14 June-9 July, 1994.

 

Arlene Ladden is a Bronx-born native New Yorker. She holds a BA in English from SUNY at Buffalo and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She also has both an MA in English and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from NYU, where she specialized in Medieval Studies. She is a full professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) where she was actively involved in College and University governance: as college and University Senator; as member of the CUNY Council of Governance Leaders, as interim chair of the English Department; as President of the Faculty Council. In these capacities, she was a strong advocate for students, for faculty, for a strong liberal arts curriculum, and for continuing access to low-cost education for any student with the will to learn. Most recently, she appears in The Heretics, a feature film on the work and influence of the Heresies Collective, of which she was a founding member. This full-length documentary--which charts the Collective’s groundbreaking work and its influence on the Feminist arts movement--will have its NYC premiere at MOMA in October of 2009.
Arlene Ladden lives in Manhattan with her artist husband and their daughter Cassidy. She divides her time between NYC and upstate New York where she continues to privately but actively write poetry.
 

Daniel Lynch came to LaGuardia in 1974. He is a Professor of English and a former chair of the English Department. He has published short stories, poems, essays, reviews, articles on pedagogy and a novel, Ventry (1990). He has received several PSC/CUNY grants for Creative Writing, also a three-year VATEA grant from New York State ($160,000) to introduce the use of computers with word processing software in teaching writing to learning disabled students. This was the start of our department’s use of computers. He is a past president of the New York College English Association. An editor of New York Stories since its inception in Spring 1998, he has been editor-in-chief since 2000. He is also the Grievance Counselor for the College’s chapter of the PSC. In the last year, in 71 visits to LaGuardia’s pool, he has swum 43 miles. Schools Attended: Fordham College (B.A.) and University of Pennsylvania (M.A. and Ph.D.) Area of Specialization: The written word and how it comes to be. Favorite Quote: "The hits keep on comin'." Or, as Heraclitus put it,"Panta rhe." Or, yet again, as Suzuki Roshi said, "All phenomena are in ceaseless change, all subject to the laws of cause and effect." We just have to deal with it. Authors I teach:

• Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Euripides, Medea
• The Bible as literature
• William Shakespeare, (most often) The Tempest, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• New York Stories

I assign a book, generally a novel, in every class I teach. [In 1975, a student who was about to graduate from this college told me had never read a book. I vowed that none of my students would be able to say that.] In addition to a host of poets, essayists and short story writers, in recent years I have taught in various classes these books (in no particular order):

• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies
• Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
• Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams
• Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine
• Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• Pete Hamill, Forever
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
• Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim
• Anza Yezierska, Breadgivers
• Jamaica Kinkcaid, Lucy

 

Lizzie Harris McCormick joined the English Department at LaGuardia in the fall of 2009. She recently finished her dissertation “Proteus of the Mind: The Creative Imagination in Literature and Psychology at the Fin de Siècle,” and is at work on revising it into a book. Covering the time period from Darwin to Freud, her project looks at the ways late Victorian psychologists and biographers described the operations of the creative mind. It then compares these ideas to the ways “fantastic” fiction writers - such as Oscar Wilde, Rachilde and Una Ashworth Taylor - showed creativity working. She has presented papers at various conferences such as the Modern Language Association, North Eastern Modern Language Association, College English Association, and the Stony Brook Annual Conference on Writing, to name a few. In addition, she was one of the founding editors of Tarpaulin Sky journal and press and has published her own poems in several print journals. She is an avid cook, dog lover and painter in her free time.
Schools attended: Bennington College (B.A.); City University of New York (M.Phil., Ph. D).
Areas of Specialization: Victorian and Edwardian Literature; Literature and Science; Ancient Literature (and its relation to our world); Monster Fiction; and Gender and Sexuality in Literature.
Favorite Quote: "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." – William James
Authors I love to teach: Euripides, Ovid, Homer, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. B. Yeats, Henry James, William Blake, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Bernadette Meyer, Anne Winter, Ernest Dowson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Tennyson and John Donne.
 

Ken Monteith grew up on a small dairy farm on the border of Western Massachusetts and Northern Connecticut. His family has been farming for six generations; however, the family also has a history of writers, activists, ministers, carpenters, nurses, educators, musicians, artists, sales people, and assorted hell-raisers. All these influences combined to make Dr. Monteith pursue a career in Literature. Dr. Monteith is distantly related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eli Whitney, and Jonathan Edwards (He of the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon); however, his literary and teaching interests are primarily Modern American and British Literature, Modern Poetry, Post-Colonial Literature, anything to do with Irish Studies, and Occultism. Dr. Monteith began teaching at LaGuardia in the Fall of 2006 and has taught Basic Writing 099, Composition 101 and Writing Through Literature 102. Dr. Monteith has published on poetry, literary hoaxes, and the occult. His book Yeats and Theosophy was published by Routledge Press, 2007.
Dr. Monteith also likes a good joke, but despite what it says on "Ratemyprofessor.com," one need not laugh at his jokes to pass one of his courses. One only needs to do the work, and do the work well.
 

Michelle Pacht is an Associate Professor of English who earned her M.A. in English Literature at Hunter College and her Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches a range of courses at LaGuardia, including Basic Writing, Composition I: An Introduction to Expository Writing, Composition II: Writing Through Literature, The Short Story, and the Liberal Arts Capstone course, Humanism, Science and Technology. She has also taught courses on The Short Story Cycle, William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe at Hunter College.
Dr. Pacht research focuses on how genre—the short story and short story cycle, in particular—has been used by 19th and 20th century American authors to raise questions about notions of identity, history, and place. She has presented papers at scholarly conferences on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles W. Chesnutt, Flannery O’Connor, Louise Erdrich, and Henry James, and contributed a chapter on Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine to the collection Narratives of Community: Women's Short Story Sequences published in 2007. Her book, The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America, was published in 2009. She has also published articles on the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Before coming to LaGuardia, she has worked as a writer and editor at Glamour magazine, a learning coordinator at the American Lung Association, and an event planner at the American Friends of the Israel Museum.
Books: The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, forthcoming 2009.
Articles:

• "Creating Community: Motherhood and the Search for Identity in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.
• " Narratives of Community: Women's Short Story Sequences. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007

Conference Papers:

• "Reclaiming the Classroom: Two Year Colleges and Innovative Self-Assessment" presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, New Orleans, LA. April 2008
• "Creating Community: Motherhood and the Search for Identity in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine" presented at the National Women's Studies Association Conference, St. Charles, IL. June 2007.
• "How to Reform a Racist: Genre as Politics in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman" presented at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA. May 2007.
• "Creating Connections: Isolation, Epiphany and the Collective Protagonist in O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge" presented at "O'Connor and Other Georgia Writers: A Scholarly Conference," Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, GA. April 2006.
• "Framing History: The Short Story Cycle as Political Statement in Hawthorne's Legends of the Province-House" presented at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Washington, D.C. December 2005.

Elected Offices: Executive Committee Member, Modern Language Association Discussion Group on the Two Year College

Irwin Ramirez Leopando is an Instructor in English department, where he currently teaches various writing courses. As a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is completing a dissertation on the theological dimension of Paulo Freire's pedagogy, rhetoric, and educational philosophy. His research interests include composition-rhetoric, critical pedagogy, post-colonialism, cultural studies, liberation theology, and immigrant literature. His teaching narrative "A Moment of Connection" was published in the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning in Winter 2004-05. Before coming to LaGuardia, he taught at Hunter College, John Jay College, BMCC, the Gallatin School (NYU), and Stern College (Yeshiva University). Born and raised in the Philippines, he has lived in New York City since 1995. He earned his B.A. in English at Columbia University ('99) and his M. Phil. at the CUNY Graduate Center ('07).
 

Dr. Ramírez is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her research on performance and Operation Pedro Pan has won a Centro de los Estudios Puertorriqueños Caribbean Exchange Grant, a Monroe Carell Fellowship award, an Elly Chovel award from Operation Pedro Pan Inc., and was featured as part of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs 2008 Immigrant Heritage Week.
Her work is published in Theatre Journal, Recent Trends in Latino and Latin American Performing Arts, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Collages & Bricolages, Cuban Studies Journal, and she has served as a past Managing Editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre. She has presented work at major national and international conferences including the annual meetings of the International Federation for Theatre Research, the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Latin American Theatre Today Festival, the International Hispanic Theatre Festival, and the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. Kimberly holds an M.F.A. in Drama from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the wife and colleague of Dr. Jason Ramírez, Assistant Professor of Theatre in LaGuardia's Department of Humanities.
 

Victor Rosa is a lecturer in the English Department. He holds an MA in Journalism from Northeastern University in Boston, where he was Reading, Writing and Study Skills Coordinator for the Ujima Scholars Program. His articles and poetry have appeared in the Amsterdam News, Bilingual Review, Compost, The Lynn EveningItem and other publications. He was an associate producer and cohost of WBAI’s Latino Journal. At LaGuardia, he teaches Basic Writing, Composition, and Broadcast Journalism. He is also a faculty advisor to the College’s web radio station.
 

Noam Scheindlin joined the English department in 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His doctoral dissertation, “The Bungled One: Failure and the Fictional Impetus,” inquires into the relationship between the intimate, solitary experience of being a person, and its expression in language. In exploring the Bible, and works by Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, and Georges Perec, the study puts forward the notion that it is the “failure,” to fully express who one is, that results in the consciousness proper to reading and writing fiction. Scheindlin is also at work on a study of democracy in the work of Herman Melville. His interests include phenomenology and hermeneutics; 20th Century French and American Poetry; and the theory of the novel. He has contributed to the volume The Proust Project, edited by André Aciman.
 

I did my Bachelor’s degree in writing at Queens College, followed by a Master’s and Doctorate in English Literature at New York University. I’ve taught literature and writing at Brooklyn College, York College, City Tech, New York University, and the College of New Rochelle. In my own research, I study “texts” (both literary and audio-visual) for signs of unconscious hopes and fears which are shaped by social narratives, and which are both concealed and revealed through the logic of dreams. I’m currently writing a book about shame and the development of identity in 20th century U.S. literature. I also enjoy writing and reading about popular cultural “texts” such as video games and movies.
Schools Attended: New York University.
Area of Specialization: 20th century U.S. literature and psychoanalytic theory.
Favorite Quote: “Do. Or do not. There is no ‘try.” -- Yoda Authors I teach:

• “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston, composition
• “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich, composition
• “Seeing,” Annie Dillard, composition
• “Three Days to See,” Helen Keller, basic writing
• “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell, composition

 

A professor of English at LaGuardia (where I specialize in Shakespeare, The Great Writer: Chaucer, English Grammar & Syntax, and Honors Poetry), I have been the recipient of consecutive PSC-CUNY Research Foundation awards since 1990, as well as two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am currently completing a book-length project, The Spanish "Dianas": Their Significance, Impact, and Legacy (under contract with The Edwin Mellen Press) and working on a radical rereading of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
I have published numerous scholarly papers, reflecting my interest in renaissance rhetorical and allegorical poetics, in such journals as Renaissance Quarterly, Studies in Philology, The Journal of Comparative Literature, The Shakespeare Newsletter, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and Portuguese Studies and have contributed a chapter, "Exile under Fire: Reassessing the Poetics and Practice of Manuel de Faria e Sousa," to Global Impact of the Portuguese Language(Transaction Publishers, 2001). I have presented papers in such venues as, most recently, Miami, Florida: annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America; Florence, Italy, at the conference, "Florence 2000": Renaissance Society of America; Lisbon, Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional): Mediterranean Studies Association; Montreal and Albany: NEMLA; New York City: MLA; and Newark, N.J. (Rutgers University): first international conference on Portugal and Portuguese-speaking literature.
I am fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, aspire to be an ever-better Latinist, and can read several other languages with relative ease. My primary avocations are “chilling” with my wife, children, close friends, and baby pooch, Macho; making home-made wine, a craft I learned in childhood from my father; and playing the classical guitar for which I also enjoy arranging jazz and international music. I am an active member of the Renaissance Society of America (for which I occasionally review scholarly books) and am listed in Who's Who Among America's Teachers (multiple-year honoree) and in the Directory of American Scholars. Among my special thrills in life are seeing my students' eyes light up as they make new, life-affirming discoveries about literature and feeling their energies energize mine as we share readings of magnificently enduring and probing texts.
Schools Attended: Ph.D.: CUNY Graduate Center; M.A.: Brooklyn College of CUNY; B.A.: Seton Hall University. Area of Specialization: Renaissance literature of England and the Continent, particularly Spain and Portugal. Favorite Quote: "Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleased too little or too much. At every trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense; Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move; For fools admire, but men of sense approve. As things seem large which we through mists descry Dulness us ever apt to magnify." ~ (from part 2 of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism)
Authors I teach: Besides Chaucer and Shakespeare, whom I teach in courses of their own, I regularly teach Homer's Odyssey, as well as Henry James, Alice Walker, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Shakespeare, in Writing through Literature; Homer’s Iliad and Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in Freshman Composition; and the fictional works of Kate Chopin, Guy de Maupassant, and Isabel Allende in Basic Writing.
 

C. Jason Smith is an Associate Professor of English. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Texas A&M University-Commerce and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Arkansas with major fields in Critical Theory, World Literature, the Anglophone Diaspora, and Spanish and Latin American Literature. He has published and presented widely on issues of sex, gender, and the body as represented in literature, film, and new media. His first book, Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley (Continuum, 2004; co-authored with Ximena Gallardo C.), was a recipient of the Ray and Pat Browne National Book Award from The Popular Culture Association. Dr. Smith is currently completing an interdisciplinary book on embodiment and representation tentatively titled Virtual Culture: Imagining Human Society.
Schools Attended: Texas A&M University-Commerce (B.A. and M.A.) and the University of Arkansas (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature).
Area of Specialization: Gender Theory, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Film and New Media, World Literature, Composition.
Selected Publications:

• Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. Co-author. New York: Continuum, 2004.
• "Alien Films." Co-author. In Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia. Oxford: Greenwood Press, 2008.
• "Body Matters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games." Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): n.p.
• "Oy SF! An Interview with Marleen S. Barr." Co-author. Reconstruction 4.3 (Fall 2005): n.p.
• "To See More Clearly and Broadly: Science and the Postmodern Sentiment" Postmodern Science: A Special Issue of Reconstruction 4.5 (Fall 2004): n.p.
• "'The End of Man is to Know': Critical Teleology and the Posthuman Body." Reconstruction 4.3 (Summer 2004): n.p.
• "Cinderfella: J.K. Rowling's Wily Web of Gender." Co-author. In Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Greenwood, 2003. 192-205.
• "Philosophers, Fools, and Kings: Notes on The Brother's Karamazov and All the King's Men." rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies, 2 (2002): 123-140.
• "The Observing Body: Quantum Mechanics, the Anthropic Principles, and Panopticism," Reconstruction 2.1 (Winter 2001-2002): np.
• "Schrödinger's Cat and Sara's Child: John Fowles' Quantum Narrative," Mosaic: the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 32.2 (June 1999): 91-106.

Books: Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. Co-author. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Articles:

• "Body Matters in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games." Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): n.p. "To See More Clearly and Broadly: Science and the Postmodern Sentiment" Postmodern Science: A Special Issue of Reconstruction 4.5 (Fall 2004): n.p.
• "'The End of Man is to Know': Critical Teleology and the Posthuman Body." Reconstruction 4.3 (Summer 2004): n.p. "Cinderfella: J.K. Rowling's Wily Web of Gender." Co-author. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays: Praeger, 2003. 192-205.
• "Philosophers, Fools, and Kings: Notes on The Brothers Karamazov and All the King's Men." rWp: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies, 2 (2002): 123-140.
• "Schrödinger's Cat and Sara's Child: John Fowles' Quantum Narrative," Mosaic: the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 32.2 (June 1999): 91-106.

Awards and Honors:

• Games and Simulation Technologies as Pedagogical Tools. Co-recipient. CUNY Collaborative Research Grant Project, 2008-2009.
• Professional Staff Congress of CUNY Research Fellowship. 2008-2009.
• Professional Staff Congress of CUNY Research Fellowship. 2007-2008.
• Enhancing Services for CUNY Veterans. Co-author. 2006-2008.
• Professional Staff Congress of CUNYResearch Fellowship. 2005-2006.
• Salute to Scholars: CUNY Chancellor's Reception, Honoree. For the book Alien Woman, 2005.
• Ray and Pat Browne National Book Award from the Popular Culture Association, 2005.
• West Virginia Humanities Council. Research Fellow. For the book Alien Woman, 2002.

 

Laura Tanenbaum joined LaGuardia in the Fall of 2007, having previously taught composition and literature at New York University, Queens College, and Suffolk County Community College. She completed her PhD at NYU and wrote her dissertation on the relationship between political and social upheavals of the sixties and American Literature, with an emphasis on works by Roth, Pynchon and DeLillo. Her articles have appeared in Open Letters Monthly, Studies in Jewish American Literature, Working Papers on the Web, Phillip Roth Studies, and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Literature. She is also a fiction writer and is excited to be working with LaGuardia's new student Creative Writing Club. Her fiction has appeared in failbetter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Steel City Review.
Along with Basic Writing, Composition I, and Introduction to Literature, she has taught the cluster "America in the World," American Literature I, and Art, Politics and Protest.
Schools Attended: Smith College (B.A.), New York University (M.A., PhD).
Areas of Specialization: Twentieth Century American Literature, Composition, Film, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, The Historical Novel.
Favorite Quote about Writing: “It is possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults.” – Grace Paley
Favorite Authors to Teach: James Baldwin, Junot Diaz, Tim O'Brien, Jamaica Kincaid, Studs Terkel.
 

Gordon Tapper has been teaching a variety of English courses at LaGuardia since 2003, including Basic Writing, Composition, Writing Through Literature, The Novel, LIB200 (focusing on Humanism and Genocide), and a Liberal Arts Cluster he helped develop called “Sex Wars: Sexuality, Power, and Culture in a Global Context.” He is a scholar of American literature and culture, with a special interest in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and his book about the poet Hart Crane, The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body, was published by Routledge Press in 2006. In addition to publishing reviews of contemporary art and experimental poetry, he has written introductions for new editions of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, both published by Barnes and Noble Classics. Professor Tapper holds a PhD and MA from Columbia University, and a BA from Colgate University. He has also taught at Columbia University, DePauw University, and Centre College.
Schools Attended: Colgate University BA; Columbia University PhD & MA
Area of Specialization: Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature and Culture, Modern and Postmodern Poetry and Poetics, Cultural Theory of the Body, Gender Studies, Literatures of Genocide.
Authors I teach: I'm always experimenting with new works, but recently I have taught Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Spiegelman's Maus, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter in The Novel.
Books: The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Articles:

• Introduction, notes, and bibliography for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007.
• Introduction, notes, and bibliography for Willa Cather's My Ántonia. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.
• "Morton Minsky Reads The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Meaning of Burlesque." Arizona Quarterly. Winter 2000.
• "Thorny Rose." (fiction). MyWays. Ed. Rita McBride and David Gray. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Inc. and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006.

Conference Presentations :

• "A Study of High Stakes Testing Practices: CUNY and Beyond." Delivered at the Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, New York, March 2007.
• "LaGuardia Community College's Difficult Dialogues Project." Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, New Orleans, January 2007.
• "Translation, Invented Victims, and the Social Construction of Authorship: Learning from the Yasusada Hoax." Delivered at the Modernist Studies Association Conference, Chicago. November 2005.
• "The Invented Indian of The Bridge: Hart Crane and the Ethnographic Idea of Culture." Delivered at Modern Language Association Convention, December 2000.
• "Directions in Poetics and Theory at the Millennium." Panel Chair, Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 2000.
• "Hart Crane, Burlesque, and the Indecent Human Body." Delivered at the Modernist Studies Association Conference, Penn State University, October 1999.

Grants:

• PSC-CUNY 39 Research Award, 2008-2009.
• PSC-CUNY 38 Research Award, 2007-2008.
• CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, Spring 2007.
• CUNY Community College Collaborative Incentive Research Grant, 2005.

 

I am Professor of English here at LaGuardia, teaching composition, grammar, and literature. I was the founder and co-facilitator of the Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop, supporting colleagues in their scholarly endeavors. I hold an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington at Seattle and a Ph.D. in English from The State University of New York at Stony Brook. My dissertation "Representing China to the British Public in the Age of Free Trade, c. 1833-1844" examines the intersections between Britain's popular representations of China and its imperial policy during the Opium War.
I am interested in postcolonial studies, interdisciplinary studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. I have published in Peer English, The History Teacher, In Transit, Nursing Education Perspectives, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Victorians Institute Journal, and Writing Macao. My essays also appear in anthologies such as Illness in the Academy: A Collection of Pathographies by Academics (Purdue University Press) and Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia (Hong Kong University Press).
If you are interested in my approaches to teaching, see my course portfolio titled "Course Portfolio on ENC101: Combining First-Semester Composition and a Placement Test" at the Peer Review of Teaching Project of University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Articles:

• "A Reading of Readings: English Travel Books, Audiences, and Modern Chinese History, C. 1832 to the Present." Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Eds. Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. 47-70, 235-40.
• "When Nursing Meets English: Using a Pathography to Develop Nursing Students' Culturally Competent Selves." Co-author. Building a Diverse Nursing Workforce. Special issue of Nursing Education Perspectives 29.3 (May/June 2008): 151-55.
• "More Than a Case." Illness in the Academy: A Collection of Pathographies by Academics. Ed. Kimberly R. Myers. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007. 392-401.
• "The Immense Possibilities of Narrating 'I': Developing Student Voice through a Career Research Project." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 34.1 (2006): 84-91.
• "Representing 'Great England' to Qing China in the Age of Free Trade Imperialism: The Circulation of A Tract by Charles Marjoribanks on the China Coast." Political Matters. Ed. David E. Latané, Jr., et al. Special issue of Victorians Institute Journal 33 (2005): 178-95.
• "Don't be Shy of "I": Empowering Student Voice through a Career Research Paper." In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning 1.1 (2005): 59-63.
• "Open Admissions, Controversies, and CUNY: Digging into Social History Through a First-Year Composition Course." The History Teacher 38.4 (2005): 469-482.
• Introduction. "Our Street Ballads, No.4.: Governor Yeh." 1857. Poetry and the Colonies. Ed. David E. Latané, Jr. and Elisabeth Gruner. Special issue of Victorians Institute Journal 32 (2004): 83-85.
• "Ways to Carry a Baby." Writing Macao: Creative Text and Teaching 3 [2005]: N.p. 6 July 2005 .

Grants:

• 2009-2010: CUNY Fellowship Leave for One Year
• 2007-2008: PSC-CUNY 38 Research Award
• 2006-2007: PSC-CUNY 37 Research Award
• 2006: CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program
• 2005-2006: PSC-CUNY 36 Research Award
• 2004-2005: PSC-CUNY 35 Research Award

 

As an undergraduate I majored in Philosophy. After college, I spent two years in Europe, teaching English as a Second Language in Spain; this was when I discovered how enriching and satisfying teaching could be. I came to New York, began a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and, almost simultaneously, started teaching as an adjunct at Queens College. When I was hired full-time at LaGuardia in 1990, I became involved in learning communities (thematically clustered courses) and have since designed and taught in many with colleagues in Theatre and Philosophy. Last Fall, we taught a cluster called, Identity, Performance and Poetic Justice, and this Fall we are teaching Heroes, Gods and Monsters: Classic Stories Then and Now. More than anything else I appreciate the freedom LaGuardia has given me to design courses, expand programs and to work creatively with great students and colleagues. One course that I have found especially interesting to teach over the years is LIB 200, Humanism, Science and Technology, a capstone seminar for graduating liberal arts majors. In this seminar, students research and apply knowledge from core liberal arts courses to contemporary issues (from AIDS as a global pandemic to Sex Tourism in Thailand).
Schools Attended: A.B. Bishop’s University , Quebec, Canada ; Ph.D. City University Graduate Center, Comparative Literature Program
Area of Specialization: The novel: my dissertation was based on the work of Henry James and Marcel Proust—unlikely partners; I love to teach the novel—from classic to postmodern—Emily Bronte, Haruki Murakami. Zora Neale Hurston and Garcia Marquez; I also love postcolonial novels like Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. More I recently have taught literature of the American Southwest and have been discovering and teaching Latino and Native American poets.
Favorite Quote: Re-reading E.M. Forster this Spring, I came across the following somber statement: “Death destroys a man but the idea of death saves him” (E.M. Forster, Howard’s End) and because I teach classical tragedy in many courses (Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Medea), I thought about why we are fascinated by the inevitable end of things and how Forster is right: that how we make meaning—by thinking about endings. The Chorus in Oedipus Rex, contemplating the fate of the hero, observes: “What man, what man on earth wins more of happiness than a seeming/and after that turning away.” Here is Virginia Woolf in a similar mood: “Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to eve that death ended absolutely? But somehow she survived she being part of the trees at home, part of the people she had never met, being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. . .she felt herself everywhere. . . so that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them.”
Authors I teach: Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Henry James, Washington Square; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; and the most popular poem I have taught this year, Jimmy Santiago Baca, “As Life was Five.”
 

Luke Vassiliou came to LaGuardia in 2009 as Assistant Professor of English. He grew up in Greece and came to the US to pursue graduate study on a Fulbright Scholarship. His interests include Rhetoric and Composition, Narrative Theory, British Victorian Literature and Twentieth-Century American Literature, while he has also presented and published on issues of Honors education. He is the contact advisor for Alpha Theta Phi, LaGuardia's chapter of the PTK International Honors Society.
Schools Attended: University of Athens-Greece (B.A.-ESL Education); Illinois State University (M.A. in English/Rhetoric); Louisiana State University (PhD-English).
Favorite Quote: "You can be hated for your good works as much as for your evil ones"--Niccolo Machiavelli
 

Dr. James Wilson joined the English department at LaGuardia in 2000 and was appointed to the doctoral faculty in the Theatre Ph.D. Program at CUNY Graduate Center in Spring 2009. He teaches a range of courses, including basic writing, college composition, drama, and African American literature. As deputy chair of the English Department at LaGuardia, he is responsible for hiring and mentoring adjunct faculty and working closely with the chair in creating the schedule of English classes each semester. Other administrative functions include co-directing the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) program, which centers around a series of faculty development workshops for integrating writing into courses taught across the college, and advising graduate students in professional advancement.
Dr. Wilson received his BA in English from SUNY Fredonia; his MA in English from SUNY Albany; and his Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism from CUNY Graduate Center. His articles have appeared in Urban Education, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Theatre History Studies. His essay, "Ladies and Gentlemen, People Die: The Uncomfortable Performances of Kiki and Herb," appeared in an anthology of lesbian and gay theatre and performances in Fall 2008. Dr. Wilson is co-editor of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, which is published by the Martin E. Segal Center (CUNY Graduate Center).His book, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Race, Performance, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, was published by the University of Michigan Press in June 2010.
 

I started out to be a theoretical physicist, but because of one extraordinary English professor I had as an undergrad, in a course I didn't even want to take but had to (Thank you, Dr. Jim Dale, wherever you are) my love of literature and beautiful writing was ignited, and my path took a very different turn. It was also this wonderful teacher who gave me my first teaching gig at the tender age of 18, as a kind of junior T.A. I gave four lectures in a course called English for Engineers 100, and a passion for teaching was passed on. Here I am 25 quick years later and I still love what I do. Whether it's ENG 099 or ENG 250, it's always interesting, always challenging, and always fun. I have learned how profoundly great teaching impacts a person's life, and I experienced firsthand the ability to empower that a committed teacher possesses, so I try to remember that every time I enter a classroom.
Schools Attended: McMaster University, University of Toronto, CUNY Graduate Center.
Area of Specialization: Postmodern Science-based Fiction
Favorite Quote: "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Authors I teach: Anything by James Baldwin, any chance I get, for his unflinching humanism. In ENG 102 I love to teach Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for her prophetic take on the dangers of scientific hubris; her story is as timely now as it was when she wrote it. Donald Barthelme's Snow White in ENG102 and ENG250 because it's fun to watch students' inevitable response to this (anti)novel: freaked out and then fascinated!