Deborah Aschkenes

Deborah Aschkenes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  After earning her B.A. from NYU, Deborah worked at Saks Fifth Avenue as the Director of Learning and Development.  She received her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from Columbia University and was awarded the English Department’s Miron Cristo-Loveanu prize for Best Master’s Essay.  Deborah taught Columbia’s essay writing course in the Core Curriculum for two years and then served as a consultant at Columbia’s Writing Center.  Her dissertation project asks how theories about mental imagery influenced the form of description in nineteenth-century novels.

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.

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.

Irvin Hunt

After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College, Irvin Hunt went on to receive an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in English and American literature. Awarded the Ford Fellowship for Graduate Study, he then enrolled as a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has received two M.A.s. Hunt's department also awarded him the John W. Kluge Fellowship for a New Generation of Faculty Excellence. In 2005, he released a book of letters titled Family. He has published articles in the Maroon Tiger and Independent School. In 2010, he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show as an Oprah Scholar. Currently, Hunt is writing a dissertation on the politics of humor during the Civil Rights Movement.

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.

Barbara Morris

Barbara Morris is a University of Chicago Ph.D. and the co-founder of a pioneering program in graduate research and writing at Parsons the New School for Design in the division of Art, Media and Technology. She has worked as a professor of film and literature at UCLA, Rutgers University, and Fordham University. Dr. Morris has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Committee, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the governments of Spain, the United States, and Argentina for her work in cinema studies.

Daniel Scanlon

Daniel Scanlon holds a B.A. from Columbia College and an M.Phil. from Yale University in comparative literature. He has taught at both Yale and Columbia. His current areas of interest and research include writing instruction, contemporary philosophy, and Irish language literature.

Steen Sehnert

Steen Sehnert majored in psychology and philosophy at Colby College and holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. He studies the effect of engagement with material on learning and comprehension, investigating the best ways to engage students in the classroom and at home. Most recently he has been trying to understand where value comes from and how people can affect their own experience of value in the way they engage with a stimulus.

Margaret Vandenburg

Margaret Vandenburg, Senior Lecturer in English at Barnard College, is the Director of First-Year English: Reinventing Literary History and former Associate Director of the Writing Program. Her published work includes essays on T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, and the cult of domesticity as well as a historical novel featuring the avant-garde salons in Paris. She has recently completed critical studies of Oeditorial repression in Hemingway's fiction and the politics of aesthetics in Gertrude Stein's plays. Professor Vandenburg has been honored with the Emily Gregory Award which celebrates excellence in teaching by the Barnard faculty.

Debbie Yuster

Debbie Yuster received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia in 2007. She is currently an assistant professor of mathematics at SUNY Maritime. Prior to this, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers University. Her research interests include combinatorics, computational geometry, and algebraic aspects of topological dynamics. Dr. Yuster has taught undergraduate courses at Columbia and other universities, and has worked with New York City math teachers and their students in order to promote interest in math, as part of the National Science Foundation's GK-12 program.