Faculty A-E

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 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 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 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 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's first novel won the Delacorte Press Prize for young adult fiction, and her short fiction and essays have been published in Teachers & Writers Magazine and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is currently at work on a second novel and book of essays.

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 is the author of Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014); 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 Guesting: Essays, Essay/Stories (Understory Books, 2022). His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Out Magazine; Open Democracy; Gargoyle Magazine; Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review; Environmental Philosophy; 3:AM Magazine; Cleaver Magazine; Entropy Magazine; The Nervous Breakdown; and elsewhere. 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 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 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 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 holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and is a recipient of the Global South Research Fellowship from Tulane and the Guilbeau Research Fellowship from the University of Louisiana. Currently, Amanda is working on her first book, The (Un)Balanced Canon, which re-visions major theories of gender and mental illness in 20th-century feminist literary criticism. Her other research and writing interests include the politics and poetics of place, psychogeography, and the intersections of objects and memory. Amanda can be reached at ac4046@nyu.edu.

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 his high school summers he worked rogueing and detasseling seed corn fields. Recipient of both a Hodder Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, Anthony’s poems have very occasionally appeared in magazines. His first book, Carnations, was published in 2011 as part of the Princeton University Press Series of Contemporary Poets. His second The New World: Infinitesimal Epics will be published in the same series in the Fall of 2021.  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

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 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 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.

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 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 is a Clinical Associate Professor and Senior Assistant Director for Placement in the Expository Writing Program. He started teaching at EWP in 1994, and for the past dozen years or so, his focus has been on teaching and developing the International writing courses. For twenty summers, he also taught in the Educational Opportunity Fund Program at Montclair State U. (N.J.), where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in English and American Literature. Currently, he also serves as the EWP Coordinator for the Writing Affiliates Program.

Gita holds a Ph.D. in English Education from NYU and MA in English from Rutgers University—Newark. Her areas of research and teaching interests include second language writing, assessment, threshold concepts and writing transfer, writing center studies, and writing program development and teacher-training in global settings. She is the author of Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013) and her writing has appeared in Writing and Pedagogy, WPA Journal, and several edited collections including Pedagogical Perspectives on Cognition and Writing, Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, Teaching U.S.-Educated Multilingual Writers: Practice for and from the Classroom, and Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White. 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 Program. In 2013 she received a Fulbright Specialist award to Vietnam and spent six weeks as an academic consultant and multilingual writing expert at the Banking Academy of Vietnam in Hanoi and Ha Nam Teacher Training College in Phu Ly city. Gita regularly serves as a reviewer for CCCC, Fulbright Student and Specialist grants, and for academic journals in Rhetoric and Composition. Gita can be reached at gdb2038@nyu.edu.

Michelle Dent is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program and Faculty Fellow in Residence at the Broome Residential College. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies (NYU), 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.

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 is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program. Her collection of poems, Phrasebook for the Pleiades, was published in 2013, and her poetry and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, FIELD, Barn Owl Review, and American Poetry Journal.

Christopher Edling’s career began in Los Angeles at The Hollywood Improv, National Lampoon, CBS Radio, The Hollywood Reporter, and other media outlets. A former Fulbrighter, WWOOFer, United Nations consultant, and Peace Corps Volunteer, he enjoys talking with students about service and cross-cultural exchange. He holds an MFA in Writing and a Certificate in Feminist Scholarship from Columbia University, as well as CELTA certification from the University of Cambridge.

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.