Nicholas Boggs

Nicholas Boggs holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D from Columbia University. He currently teaches in the Liberal Studies Master of Arts Program at Columbia University, where he also serves as Faculty Advisor for students concentrating in American Studies.  His writing has appeared in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU Press), Callaloo, Mary: A Literary Quarterly, and Chelsea Station.  The recipient of an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University, two scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, as well as residencies at the artist colonies Yaddo and MacDowell, he is currently writing a book about James Baldwin’s collaboration with the French painter, Yoran Cazac.

Peter Conolly-Smith

Peter Conolly-Smith received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. He has worked extensively in fiction and documentary film and teaches history, culture, and film at CUNY-Queens College, where he received the 2009 President's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He is the author of Translating America (Smithsonian Press, 2004), as well as numerous academic articles on ethnicity, culture, film and history.

Lindsey Freer

Lindsey Freer holds a B.A. in English from Barnard College and an M.Phil. from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is an instructional technology fellow at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College and teaches American literature and history at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is currently completing a dissertation on twentieth-century literature, exploring how nationalist politics and postmodern aesthetics shaped American poetry communities in the 1970s and 1980s.

Rose-Ellen Lessy

Rose Ellen Lessy holds an A.B. from Brown University in comparative literature and an M.A. from Cornell University, where she is currently completing her Ph.D. in English and American literature. She has served as an instructor for several years in the John S. Knight writing program at Cornell. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between American literary realism and medical science in the early twentieth century.

Karen Vrotsos

Karen Vrotsos holds a B.A. in English and political science from Wellesley College and an M.A. and M.Phil. in English from Columbia University, where she is working on a dissertation to complete her Ph.D. She has taught Reinventing Literary History at Barnard College, literature and writing courses at Columbia College, and professional writing and public speaking to international students at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Her interests include classical literary theory, renaissance literature, and modernism. She has also developed interests in urban affairs, cultural criticism, and marketing. She directed a fellowship program for urban leaders at Columbia for several years and co-authored a book on marketing and culture with Professor Bernd Schmitt of Columbia Business School.

Audrey Walton

Currently a Ph.D. student in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia, Audrey Walton received her B.A. (2002) and her M.T.S. (2008) from Harvard University, where she studied creative writing, medieval literature, and medieval religion. She is the recipient of a Marjorie Hope Nicolson fellowship from Columbia and is currently an instructor in Columbia's University Writing program. In addition to producing a number of websites and publicity campaigns as a freelance writer, she has also recently published two scholarly articles, both of which focus on reading practices in the Middle Ages. Before beginning her Ph.D., she worked with secondary school students for many years, first as an instructor and then as the director of tutoring and summer programs for college-bound students.  She is delighted to be returning to work with high school students this summer.

Matthew Zarnowiecki

Matthew Zarnowiecki received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is assistant professor of English at Auburn University. He has taught Shakespeare, Milton, World Literature, Composition, and other courses at the college level. Zarnowiecki  has also taught English as a foreign language in Poland as a volunteer for the U.S. Peace Corps, and rock-climbing and backpacking in upstate New York for Cornell Outdoor Education. His articles have been published in The Sidney Journal and Early Modern Literary Studies, and he is at work on a book manuscript entitled Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare.