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