The Expository Writing Program is staffed by full-time, non-tenure-track lecturers on continuing appointment. Faculty include poets, fiction writers, playwrights, theater artists, and journalists, as well as scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Faculty A-E
Linell Ajello
Linell Ajello received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her research focuses on efforts to foster democracy by supporting greater political inclusion. She has published in academic journals—The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory—as well as in City Limits, a NYC investigative news website. Previously, Linell held a Mellon Fellowship at Tulane University.
Victoria Anderson
Victoria Anderson holds a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School, an MFA in dance from the University of Washington, and an MA and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. Her current interests lay in developing pedagogy for students in dance studies and expository writing that values close reading, critical thinking, and reflection. Her work has been published in TDR, Movement Research Journal, and the anthology Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global.
Lane Anderson
Lane Anderson holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests focus on reporting on issues of poverty and social justice. Before coming to NYU, she taught writing at Columbia University and Yeshiva University. She has also been a full-time and freelance journalist for various media outlets.
Natalia Andrievskikh
Natalia Andrievskikh holds an MA in English and PhD in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton. As a Russian-American, she is interested in cross-cultural negotiations of identity and loves working with international students. Natalia’s research interests include Visual and Material Rhetoric, Digital Writing, and Media and Culture Studies. She is a co-author of The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste (Parlor Press). In her creative work she explores the role of myth-making in construction and preservation of memory.
Kimberly Bernhardt
Kimberly Bernhardt received her PhD in literature from Rutgers University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, and composition. For the last three years, she has served as a Faculty Affiliate, working with residents in the Outdoor Community and Serve the City. She has also taught at Rutgers, Western Washington, and Montclair State University.
Olivia Birdsall
Olivia Birdsall believes that writing is a place for silliness and seriousness, for experimentation, testing ideas, exploring unlikely pairings and possibilities, venturing into the absurd and the unknown, finding new truths, taking risks, and, ultimately, trying to make sense of some small piece of the world. She aims to give her students time and space to find questions and ideas that matter to them, and to shape those insights into final pieces that resonate with readers. She encourages her classes to infuse their work with play. Olivia is an award-winning fiction writer whose current projects include screenplays, memoir, and many significant iPhone notes. She has been teaching at NYU for over 20 years.
Patrick Bonczyk
Patrick Bonczyk is a musicologist working at the intersection of musical instruments, animal culture, and the history of science and technology. He holds a PhD in musicology and a graduate certificate in writing pedagogy from UCLA. Prior to NYU EWP, he taught in the writing programs at NYU Shanghai and Princeton University. In his teaching, Dr. Bonczyk engages the porousness of the humanities, arts, and the sciences, creates a strong commitment to primary source work, and prioritizes curiosity, surprise, and serendipity in the research and writing process. Students will find that source materials and class discussions move fluidly from current issues in public health to experiences with music and sound in everyday life, and from analyzing visual culture to technical representations in pseudoscientific research. His students leave his classes more confident working with primary sources, more comfortable with uncertainty in their research and writing, and more aware of their own intellectual values.
Mark Braley
Mark Braley has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program as a senior language lecturer since 2013. His publications include essays on W. E. B. DuBois and Wallace Stegner. A former Air Force officer and United States Air Force Academy English instructor whose interests include American literature and the literature of war, he’s currently exploring his family’s roots in the ranching life on the plains of eastern Montana. Mark can be reached at msb528@nyu.edu.
Bruce Bromley
Bruce Bromley is the author of Guesting: Essays, Essay/Stories (Understory Books, 2022); The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Stories (Backlash Press, 2017), nominated for the 2018 Victoria & Albert Best Illustrated Book Award; and Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Out Magazine; A & U: America's AIDS Magazine; Open Democracy; Gargoyle Magazine; Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review; Environmental Philosophy; 3:AM Magazine; Cleaver Magazine; On the Seawall Magazine; One Hand Clapping; The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. He has performed his music and poetry throughout the US and Europe. He teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. Bruce can be reached at bdb2@nyu.edu.
Ali Bujnowski
Ali Bujnowski has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2012. She is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in BOMB and Narrative magazines. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Stephen Butler
Stephen Butler writes about Irish America. His work appears regularly in the Irish Echo newspaper and New York Irish History, the annual journal of the New York Irish History Roundtable. His first book, Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882-1964 was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He has taught in the Expository Writing Program since 2012. Before that, he taught composition, literature and the humanities at Iona College and Kean University. He has studied at Iona and the City College of New York, and earned a Ph.D from Drew University. Stephen can be reached at sb4298@nyu.edu.
Joe Califf
Joe Califf received a B.Sc. in Evolutionary Anthropology from Rutgers University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from New York University. His academic research and interests range from behavioral endocrinology and human evolution to science education and pedagogy. He has also taught and conducted research at Princeton University, the American Museum of Natural History, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, Montclair State University, and Hunter College.
Amanda Capelli
Amanda Capelli holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and is a recipient of the Global South Research Fellowship from Tulane. Her research and writing interests include gender and mental illness, the politics and poetics of place, and the intersections of objects and memory. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Cagibi: A Literary Place, Talking Writing, the North Carolina Literary Review, The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South, and elsewhere. Her teaching praxis revolves around using writing as a technology for thinking and research as a generative act. The goal for her is to help students redefine what research is, to see the relationship between writing and research, and to embrace the recursivity of both. Amanda can be reached at ac4046@nyu.edu.
Anthony Carelli
Anthony Carelli has taught in NYU’s Expository Writing Program since 2012. He was raised in Poynette, Wisconsin, a no-stoplight village that smelled periodically of sauerkraut because of the canning factory north of town. Though he currently works as a teacher and writer, during high school he worked rogueing and detasseling seed corn fields. Anthony has published two books of poems (Carnations and The New World: Infinitesimal Epics) in the Princeton University Press Series of Contemporary Poets. As a professor Anthony challenges every student to recognize themself as an essayist and a difference-maker as they intensively explore the conventions of critical analysis, conceptual thinking, and scholarly writing. Anthony’s workshops put special emphasis on the serious play of generating and developing intellectual questions and idea-generating arguments. In every class his students can expect to face reading and writing challenges that will deeply engage their own logic, ethics, and imagination.
Katherine Carlson
Katherine Carlson is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, as well as a writer of fiction and short humor pieces. Her work has appeared in Cleaver, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the Hairpin, and explores the intersection of ambition and obligation. She has been awarded fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. She recently completed her first novel.
Jennifer Cayer
Jennifer Cayer is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program where she teaches courses in the Tisch School of the Arts, First-Year Seminars in the College of Arts & Sciences (Visuality & Literature; Artful Lives) and serves as a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) consultant. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and has taught courses on writing, interdisciplinary arts, literature, drama, and performance studies at Amherst College and UMASS. She was awarded a Copeland Fellowship on the Future of the Humanities and served as a Five College Women’s Studies Research Center Associate. Her academic essays and creative nonfiction have been published in places including The Washington Post online, Theater Journal, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, TDR: The Drama Review, Contrary Magazine, and Shondaland.com. She regularly writes about contemporary theater and performance art for Culturebot. As a WID Consultant, Jen has collaborated with faculty and students in the Psychology, Music, Art, Philosophy, Anthropology and English departments. Her writing practice across scholarly, literary and popular genres informs and inspires her teaching and consulting work; empowering students to develop the flexibility of mind and the rhetorical means to communicate across disciplinary expectations, audiences, and professional contexts.
Courtney Chatellier
Courtney Chatellier has taught at NYU since 2014. She earned her BA at NYU's College of Arts and Science before completing her PhD in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Early American Studies, Early American Literature, The Hypocrite Reader, and The Los Angeles Review. She lives in Queens.
Chu-Jiun Alice Chuang
Chu-Jiun Alice Chuang received her PhD in English literature from Vanderbilt University. Her fields of research include modernist fiction and film studies. Prior to NYU EWP, she was a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she taught in the Writing Program, mentored the Writing and Speaking Fellows at the Academic Resources Center, and edited the Hundred River Review. In the writing courses that she teaches, Dr. Chuang values intellectual ambition, creativity, discovery, exploration of the complexities of the problem at hand, and attention to the nuances of language. Students are encouraged to reflect on the relationship between English and other languages, dialects, registers, and codes they know. Moreover, Dr. Chuang has a passion for Scandinavian horror and crime fiction, Hitchcock, and monster lore, so she enjoys using clips from these works for close-reading workshops.
Suzanne Cope
Suzanne Cope is the author of the book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Chicago Review Press, 2021) and Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods. Dr. Cope has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, and The Atlantic, among others, currently focusing on the intersection of food and social and political change. Her scholarly work is in the disciplines of food studies and writing pedagogy and she has contributed to these fields through publications and conference presentations, most recently chapters in the book Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies (Routledge Research in Writing Studies) and Food for Thought(Springer). She earned an MFA in creative nonfiction and a PhD in Adult Learning, both from Lesley University.
Conor Creaney
Conor Creaney received his PhD from NYU and MA from University College Dublin. His dissertation, "Paralytic Animation: The Life of the Frozen Body in Dickens and Victorian Visual Culture," explores how frozen bodies–effigies, statues, stuffed animals and others–operate in the novel and Victorian visual culture. He has also written on novelistic form and on contemporary Irish poetry, and is Director of NYU’s Study Abroad program at Trinity College Dublin.
David Cregar
David Cregar is a Clinical Professor and Senior Assistant Director for Placement in the Expository Writing Program. He started teaching at EWP first as a graduate student (Steinhardt, English Education) and then as full-time faculty beginning in 2000. He was previously Assistant Director for the International writing course sequences, and has served as coordinator for the Writing Affiliates Program. Currently, he teaches courses in the International writing course sequence, with a focus on multilingual learners and language acquisition, research, reading, and writing. For twenty summers, he also taught in the Educational Opportunity Fund Program at Montclair State University (N.J.)
Gita DasBender
Gita holds a Ph.D. in English Education from NYU and MA in English from Rutgers University. Her areas of research, scholarship, and teaching interests include second language writing, assessment, threshold concepts and writing transfer, writing center studies, writing program development, and teacher-training. Gita is the author of Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013) and her writing has appeared in the Journal of Writing Assessment, Writing and Pedagogy, WPA Journal, and many edited collections.
Prior to joining NYU, Gita was the Coordinator of Second Language Writing at Seton Hall University where she also served as director of the Prestigious Fellowships and Scholarships Program. In 2013 she received a Fulbright Specialist award to Vietnam and spent time as an academic consultant and multilingual writing expert at two institutions in northern Vietnam. Gita regularly serves as a reviewer for academic journals in Rhetoric and Composition as well as Fulbright Student and Specialist grants. Gita can be reached at gdb2038@nyu.edu.
Michelle Dent
Michelle Dent is a Clinical Professor in the Expository Writing Program. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies (NYU) and an MA in Cultural Anthropology (Columbia) and her research interests are typically located at the intersections of the Arts & Humanities and the Social Sciences. Her work has been published in The Drama Review (TDR), Women & Performance, Streetnotes, Cambridge Scholars, Routledge, and MIT Press. Michelle can be reached at michelle.dent@nyu.edu.
Doug Dibbern
Doug Dibbern’s most recent book, Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination, is due out from punctum books in 2023. His second book, Cinema’s Doppelgängers, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film, was published in 2021. His first book, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film, won the 2016 Peter Rollins Prize. He’s also published scholarly essays on classical Hollywood filmmakers, film criticism for The Notebook at Mubi.com, and literary essays for journals like Chicago Quarterly Review and Hotel Amerika. He has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University.
Lorraine Doran
Lorraine Doran is the author of the poetry collection Phrasebook for the Pleiades. She holds a JD and an MFA in poetry, both from NYU.
Christopher Edling
Christopher Edling's career began in Hollywood. He is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, WWOOFer, UN consultant, and two-time Fulbrighter (Armenia, Kyrgyzstan). He holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and CELTA certification from the University of Cambridge.
His students read and write about culture, language, gender, education, labor, and inequality. He works in the Writing Center and enjoys talking with students during office hours about whatever they want to discuss. His classes typically begin with a few minutes of silent meditation.
David Ellis
David Ellis is a writer of short fiction, essays, poems, plays, and satires. He enjoys blending science with other disciplines and learning from the products of their unique combinations. He is currently the Faculty Writing Affiliate of Founders Hall.