Faculty F-L

Alexandra Falek joined the Expository Writing Program faculty in 2015. She has been teaching at NYU since 2002, where she taught for many years in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages and Literatures (teaching literature, cultural history and cinema, writing about memory and cultural studies, and translating fiction and poetry from Spanish to English). She has taught NYU First Year Seminars on Documentary filmmaking in Latin America and Writing about contemporary documentary photography made in the U.S. Currently she teaches Writing the Essay, leads Senior Honors Thesis Writing Groups for CAS students, participates in NYU’s Proud to Be First Faculty Connect Program and is a Faculty Consultant at NYU’s Writing Center. In the classroom, what guides Alexandra’s work with students is creating a space for openness, authenticity, rigor, curiosity and care. Alexandra earned a PhD in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from NYU and a BA from UC Berkeley.

Elisabeth Fay teaches Writing the Essay in the fall and Advanced College Essay (Steinhardt) in the spring. In addition, she works as a consultant in the NYU Writing Center and facilitates honors thesis writing groups for students working in English, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, French, and Italian. She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Cornell University, and has multiple published translations from commercial and academic presses. She is an organizer for her union, Contract Faculty United - UAW, and a founding member of the NYU Coalition for Labor Action by Workers and Students (CLAWS).

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the poetry collection Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020). Her poems and criticism have appeared in Art in America, The New Yorker, Poetry, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and elsewhere. A past recipient of fellowships from the Pocantico Center and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, she is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. She's also a two-time alum of NYU (Gallatin BA '12; GSAS '14.

David Foley has taught in the Expository Writing Program since 2008. For most of that time, he’s had the pleasure of teaching the Tisch Art and the World/The World Through Art courses. He is also a playwright and fiction writer. His works include the plays Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O'Neil, The Murders at Argos, Deadly Murder, and The Last Days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, in Exile, and the novel The Traveler's Companion. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.

Tania Friedel holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. Her interests include essay writing and American literature with a focus on African American literature and culture. Her book, Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing, is part of the Routledge Studies in African American History and Culture series.

Benjamin Gassman is a playwright; his work includes The Downtown Loop ( 3LD Arts & Technology Center), Sam’s Tea Shack (Silent Barn, the Bushwick Starr, Dixon Place), Purimacolo (2010 Weasel Festival at 13th St. Rep), Botte Di Ferro, Tunneling, and Haircuts For Men & Boys. Ben’s essays on theater and theater artists can be found in the Brooklyn Rail and American Theatre magazine.

Grant Ginder has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since the fall of 2012. Primarily a fiction writer, he’s the author of the novels This is How it Starts (Simon and Schuster, 2009), Driver’s Education (Simon and Schuster, 2013), and People We Hate at the Wedding (Flatiron Books, forthcoming).

El Glasberg first discovered Antarctica through Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 sea journey The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Glasberg follows the ceaseless lure of the unknown in Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change (Palgrave 2012). As the ice continues to melt, Glasberg persists in writing about art, music, and the environment. Their latest book project, Honky Tonk Lagoons, extends their fascination with the repressed, weird, and subterranean through the musical landscapes and material terrains in Bob Dylan’s American art. A late 20th-century graduate of SUNY Purchase with a PhD in American Studies from Indiana University, Glasberg has held faculty positions at Princeton University, American University in Beirut, Knox College, California State University at Los Angeles, and Duke University.

Andrei Guruianu is a writer whose work often explores such topics as memory and forgetting, the role of art and of the artist, and the ability of place to shape personal and collective histories. His most recent project is The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste (Parlor Press, 2019), a co-authored book that attempts to explain and ultimately redeem human fascination with discarded material objects. He has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2011.

Michele Hanks is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. She received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores the intersection of science, spirituality, and heritage. Her book, Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past, was published in 2015. Her articles have appeared in Ethnos and Focaal.

Gabriel Heller is a Clinical Professor in the Expository Writing Program. His stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Fence, The Gettysburg Review, Okey-Panky, The Stranger, The Sun, Witness, and other publications. He is the recipient of the 14th Annual Inkwell Short Story Award.  

Amy Hosig is a Clinical Professor who has been teaching writing at NYU since 2002. She has also taught writing and poetry courses at the Rubin Museum, in the Seattle Public Schools, on the Quinault Indian Nation, and with the Nicaraguan Solentiname Island Poets. She received her MFA from NYU and her BA from Oberlin College. Immortal, a vinyl record of her poems, will be released in 2023.

Robert Huddleston holds both a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. His writing has been featured in numerous publications including American Literary Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Narrative Magazine. He currently serves on the board of directors for the online literary magazine Tupelo Quarterly. 

Jeannie Im is a Clinical Professor and Assistant Director for EWP at Tandon who has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2009. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, with a specialization in twentieth century British and anglophone literature. Her work on authors such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and Twentieth Century Literature, and she has an essay on postcolonialism and infrastructure in a forthcoming collection by Northwestern University Press. Her current research explores the global impact of informational technologies and life sciences through the lens of literary fiction.

Tom Jacobs received a B.A. from Carleton College and a Ph.D. from NYU. His research interests include writers’ shifting relationships to the material cultures of everyday life, detective literature, and the politics of collecting. He is a frequent contributor to the blog 3quarksdaily and was the co-organizer of the interdisciplinary conference “Modernist Manhattan” at NYIT in 2012. Prior to (re)joining NYU this fall, Jacobs was an Assistant Professor at the New York Institute of Technology.

Mara Jebsen is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU, where she specializes in teaching Tisch students. A poet, performer, and essayist, Mara has written for the website 3quarksdaily, and has poems featured in the American Poetry Review and Transition Magazine, Harvard's Afro-Diasporan journal. A New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, Mara is also a veteran of New York's performance poetry scene, and sometime member of PUP (Pop Up Poets).

Trevor Jockims’ teaching and research interests center on literature in its interaction with other modes of thought and expression, particularly the visual arts and philosophy. Prior to coming to NYU, Jockims taught literature and film at Hunter College and City College. His fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Book Forum, The Believer, Descant, and The Journal of Experimental Fiction.

Abigail Joseph holds a PhD in English from Columbia University. Her book Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style (University of Delaware Press, 2019) explores the relationship between homosexuality and material culture in nineteenth-century England. Her articles on Victorian literature and fashion history have appeared in Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Public Books, and the edited collection Crossings in Text and Textile.

Austin Kelley’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and The New Yorker, where he spent four years in the editorial department. He is the founding editor of The Modern Spectator, a website about sports and culture. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Duke University and has been teaching in the Expository Writing Program since 2010.

Daniel Kellum grew up in the South and graduated from Yale University. He received his MFA from NYU. He has written for Slate, The Nation, and New York magazine, among others, and is currently at work on a novel.

Michelle McSwiggan Kelly received her Ph.D. in English from Fordham University in 2013. Her current book project explores the intertexts of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson.” Her areas of interest include composition studies, writing pedagogy, and literary modernism and postmodernism. Before joining NYU, Kelly was a Lecturer at Fordham University. She has been teaching writing and literature since 2006.

Amanda Kotch received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University, where her research and teaching focused on British literature of the long nineteenth century. She has published on the relationship between biography and the novel in this period. Her ongoing writing and research interests include historical and contemporary forms of life writing (especially collaborative biographies and collections on writers, artists, and performers) as well as death and material culture.

Beth Kurkjian, Ph.D. has published in TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, Performance Paradigm, and Women & Performance. As a dance theater artist, she has performed in works by Ken Nintzel, Juliana Francis, and Julia May Jonas/Nellie Tinder. Daniella Mooney’s book The Immersive Theater of GAle GAtes (2023) features Kurkjian’s reflections on performing with that company. Kurkjian has also performed her own solo work in NYC and in London. She has directed at Skidmore College and choreographed dances for Alice Reagan's Barnard/Columbia theater productions. She recently taught a workshop on poetry and movement at the TUMO school in Yerevan, Armenia. A doctoral graduate of NYU’s Performance Studies department, her scholarship specializes in post-1950’s, experimental, New York-based performance. As a writing teacher, she prizes critical thinking, essay design, community building, and creative methods to unlock new discoveries. In 2023, Dr. Kurkjian received a Teaching Design Award.

As a teacher, my goal is to help students develop the skills, strategies, and habits they’ll need to join the conversations that matter to them—conversations bound to take place in writing. As an undergraduate, it wasn’t obvious to me that all my professors (whether history, poetry, or biochemistry) had essentially the same job—to generate and communicate new knowledge through writing. Now a professor myself, I feel it's important that a college education begin with a clear sense of the mission of the university—and writing’s centrality to that mission—which isn’t just to preserve or share knowledge, but also to create it. I want students to feel invited and prepared to join in this mission, to see themselves as knowledge creators, and to see writing as a knowledge creator's most vital tool. My own writing explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and education. Before NYU, I worked at The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and Guernica Magazine.

Karen Lepri is the author of Incidents of Scattering (Noemi Press, 2013). Her poems, essays, reviews, and translations from Spanish have appeared in various national and international journals. Her writings on feminist and anti-racist pedagogy have appeared in Feminist Spaces and Albeit. Her teaching practices emphasize the importance of inclusivity, maintaining a growth-mindset, transparent assessment, a rigorous but highly scaffolded and collaborative learning experience. Lepri holds her M.F.A in Literary Arts from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She has previously taught writing and literature at Cooper Union, Bard College and Queens College CUNY. Karen can be reached at kl79@nyu.edu.

Elisa Linsky received her MS in Technical Communication at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU (now NYU Tandon) and her BA in American Studies from Wittenberg University.

Central to her teaching  is the importance of a deep engagement with the texts. “For me, the first thing, the easiest way in, is to help my students recognize someone else’s idea. My approach has always been to help students see you don’t have to be an expert to have an idea.”  The class emphasizes practicing ways to explain something new, expressing in writing a way of thinking that is particular to the writer, particular to their place in the world. The goal is to understand that the kind of technical writing students  will likely do in their careers is not that different from an expository essay. Connecting evidence to idea is the same rhetorical move in an essay as it is in a lab report. She has been teaching writing in the engineering school for over twenty years.

Liston is a cultural anthropologist whose work lives at the intersection of politics and capitalism, medicine and science, and epistemology: How does what we know about the world shape who we think should rule it?  Her first book, Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy, received the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award in 2013. Her second book, The Truth Society: Science, Disinformation and Politics in Berlusconi's Italy offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation. My anthropological imagination animates how I teach as I unremittingly seek to position all discourse in particular cultural and historical contexts. My classroom stages reading and writing as acts of engagement with other uniquely positioned social actors, and thus an opportunity to rethink and remake worlds.