Fatin Abbas is the author of Ghost Season: A Novel (W.W. Norton 2023; also forthcoming in the UK and Germany). Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Arrival, The Warwick Review, and Friction, amongst other places, and her journalism and non-fiction have appeared in The Nation, Le Monde diplomatique, Zeit Online, and Africa Is a Country, among other venues.

She has been a Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholar (UK), a Writer-in-Residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature (Switzerland), a Maison Baldwin St. Paul de Vence Writer-in-Residence (France), an Austrian Federal Chancellery/KulturKontakt Artist-in-Residence (Austria), and has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany. She gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, CUNY.

Jane Abbott came to MIT after eighteen years in industry, where she worked with teams and individuals to improve collaboration. Her focus is on how to produce communication that is effective and authentic; in particular, how listening in its many guises guides the ways in which we write, speak, meet, lead, influence, and collaborate. Professional development: Emotional Intelligence Consortium; Interaction Institute for Social Change; Harvard Program on Negotiation. B.A. in English from Swarthmore College; MA in Languages, Literature and Communication, Columbia University.

oliverarellano.com

Edward Barrett (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, where his research, teaching, and publications focus on poetry and digital media.

Poetry books: Play Lucretius (2024); The Leaves Are Something This Year: New and Selected Prose Poems (2023); The Sinatra n (2016); Toward Blue Peninsula (2014); Down New Utrecht Avenue (2011); Bosston (2008); Kevin White (2007); Or Current Resident (2005); Rub Out —Three Verse Novels (2003); Sheepshead Bay (2001); Breezy Point (2000); Practical Lullabies for Joe (1999); Common Preludes (1994); The Leaves Are Something This Year (1992); Theory of Transportation (1990); and 7x3 (1987). Plays: Antigone (translated from the Greek; produced Off-Broadway, 1982). Opera libretto: Shaman (text translated from Navajo; premier, Manhattan Chamber Opera Company, NYC 1987). Digital Media books: Building Mobile Experiences (F. Bentley and E. Barrett, MIT Press, 2012); Contextual Media: Multimedia and Interpretation (MIT Press, 1995); Sociomedia (MIT Press, 1992); The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information (MIT Press, 1989); and Text, ConText, and HyperText: Writing with and for the Computer (MIT Press, 1988). Textbooks: The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design (E. Barrett, D. Levinson, S. Lisanti, MIT Press, 2001) and The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing (L. Perelman, J. Paradis, and E. Barrett. McGraw-Hill, 1998).

Sarah Ruth Bates holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Middlebury College, a Master of Bioethics from Harvard Medical School, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her essays and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Aeon, WIRED, Guernica, WBUR, and elsewhere.​

Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing and creative projects have explored collections, landscapes, memory, and the sensory dimensions of media and technology. His work has appeared in such venues as The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times; his books include Library: An Unquiet History (Norton), The Library Beyond the Book (with Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard), and Tree (Bloomsbury). With metaLAB (at) Harvard from 2012-2022, he worked with a far-flung network of collaborators to create films, installations, and experiences from Boston to Berlin. In January 2022, he joined the staff of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, where he edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, a magazine exploring the urgency of tree-entangled science, history, and storytelling for our time.

Caroline Beimford is a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program. She has a B.A. in English from Boston College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, and has worked as an editor, technical writer, and arts outreach coordinator. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, The Oxford American, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and have received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and the Arkansas Arts Council. She recently completed a Sturgis International Research Fellowship on the intersections of journalism, activism, and immigration in Madrid.

Amy Carleton (BA, Simmons College; MA, Ph.D. Northeastern University) teaches writing and communication in courses including Measurement and Instrumentation (2.671), Product Engineering Processes (2.009), and Science Writing for the Public (21W.035).

Research interests include the invisible labor of collaboration, digital communication and knowledge transfer, and visual rhetoric.

Her articles and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, New York Magazine, NPR, and The New York Times.

Mary Caulfield is a Lecturer in Comparative Media Studies and Writing. Prior to teaching at MIT, she worked as a technical writer, creating end user documentation and doing business research.

Keith Clavin (Ph.D., Auburn University) is Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program. His teaching focuses on the rhetorical aspects of technical and professional communication as well as the cultural distinctions between discourse communities. Before coming to MIT he taught writing and literature at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and Roger Williams University.

His primary research agendas correlate literary representations with economic thinking. He has written on the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and several nineteenth-century economists. He maintains secondary interests in narrative theory and contemporary aesthetics and has published on these topics in Textual Practice and Oxford Literary Review. His current project explores the cultural and financial stakes of translation within imperial contexts.

Dave Custer has been teaching hands-on, interdisciplinary subjects for MITs Experimental Study Group and Writing Program for 30 years. His research is the testing and evaluation of equipment used in rock climbing and mountaineering.

Malcah Effron is a Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. She holds degrees from Washington University in St Louis (A.B. English and Mathematics, 2004), the University of Chicago (M.A. Humanities, 2005), and Newcastle University in England (Ph.D. English literature, 2010). Previously, she has taught writing and textual analysis courses at the university level since 2006, including for the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University. Her research explores the role of narrative and rhetoric in shaping how people experience reality, especially as presented through popular genres. Her work appears in journals such as Narrative and Women and Language, as well as in several edited collections, including her own The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film, and Television, 1990-2010 (McFarland, 2011).

Jesse Ericka Epstein is a Sundance Award-Winning documentary filmmaker. She received a Masters Degree in Documentary Filmmaking from NYU, and was named one of “25 filmmakers to watch” by Filmmaker Magazine. Her films have screened in over 40 film festivals worldwide, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), MaSS MoCA, The Peabody Museum, and Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Jesse's film 34x25x36 received a national PBS Broadcast on POV. In addition, she has a published video Op- Doc “Sex, Lies and Photoshop” in the New York Times. In addition to joining the teaching team in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, she also teaches filmmaking at Emerson College in the Department of Media & Visual Arts.

With her filmmaking, Jesse has received grants from Chicken & Egg Pictures, The Fledgling Fund, and Catapult Film Fund. She's also received a National Endowment for the Arts residency at MacDowell, a Working Films Residency at MaSS MoCA, a Family Friendly Residency at Marble House Project and Rockland Woods.

Jesse is continuously fascinated by the documentary art form and excited to share this love with her students. She is particularly interested in what this medium can do for scientific inquiry. Jesse is in production on a film about Mosquitoes, Climate Change - and high and low tech solutions.

Chris Featherman is a Lecturer in MIT's Writing and Communication Center. He earned his Ph.D. in Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle. A writing and communication instructor since 2001, Chris also studies and writes about language, media, and politics in the public sphere. He is the author of an academic monograph, Discourses of Ideology and Identity: Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests (Routledge, 2015), and he has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Media & Society, The London School of Economics Review of Books, Discourse Studies, Journal of Language and Politics, and elsewhere.

Dr. Kurt Fendt, Senior Lecturer Emiritus, teaches digital humanities and media studies subjects. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; in 2001 he was Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

Formerly the Executive Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, Fendt was co-Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded “Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students,” the "US-Iran – Missed Opportunities" project, and a number of other digital humanities projects. He was co-Principal Investigator of the d'Arbeloff-funded "Metamedia" project, co-Director of "Berliner sehen", a collaborative hypermedia documentary for German Studies, and co-author of the French interactive narrative "A la rencontre de Philippe" (CD-ROM version). In 2005 he founded the MIT Short Film Festival which he directed until 2016.

Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993. He holds an M.A. from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.

Betsy works in MIT's Writing and Communication Center, in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program, and as a freelance editor. She teaches WGS.101, Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, and has been a Writing Advisor for Introduction to World Music and to Western Music, among others. She is Treasurer of PsyArt, a foundation that supports the psychological study of the arts and holds annual international conferences, and has been President and Secretary of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. She publishes on feminism, psychoanalysis, Lawrence, and related topics. Her chapter on Edwardian Feminisms, Suffrage, and Anti-suffrage appears in D. H. Lawrence in Context, Ed. Andrew Harrington (Cambridge University Press). Ph.D. in English and American Literature, Boston University; M.Ed., Boston University; B.A. in English with pre-med, Wellesley College.

Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet, essayist, and translator from the Chinese and Spanish. She is the author two books: The Reveal and Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published by New York Review Books. She is the recipient of a NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of the novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis (University of Arizona Press, 2025). Her essays, poems, and translations have been published in such journals as BOMB, A Public Space, and Yale Review. She serves as deputy editor of Harvard Review in addition to teaching poetry at MIT.

Tracy Miller Geary is a writing advisor in WRAP and has also participated in scoring and commenting on MIT’s Freshman Essay Evaluation for twenty years. She is a freelance editor and writer, with stories in over thirty magazines and anthologies including Harvard Review, Good Housekeeping, and Puerto del Sol. She holds a Masters in Literature and Creative Writing from Harvard University.

Thanks to two wonderfully dedicated game-playing grandmothers, Andrew Grant started playing games before he could hold the cards. From there, he went on to explore board games, strategy games, role-playing games, and computer games. This exploration shows no signs of slowing down.

Andrew graduated from MIT in 1993 with Bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics (6 and 18, darnit) and a minor in Creative Writing. After six months in the real world, he discovered that someone would actually pay him to design and program computer games, so he returned to his gamer roots by joining Looking Glass Technologies, and then DreamWorks Interactive. Since then, Andrew has survived ten years as a programmer-for-hire and independent developer in projects ranging from underwater robotics to yet more games.

Jo-Ann Graziano teaches the writing course on student participation in MIT history (MIT: Inside, Live). Her background spans public policy, film, and creative writing. She directs a project at the Harvard Kennedy School which forged a knowledge network of government officials, industry, non-profit leaders, and academics. She serves as a Writing Advisor for Science, Technology and Society (STS), Education policy, and Humanities classes and teaches film in the Literature Section. Graziano is founding Executive Director of the Boston Women's Film Festival, in its fifth year in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Brattle Theater with the mission of championing the work of women artists. Her short fiction has appeared in Harvard Review and Glimmer Train, and she is working on a screenplay based on Katherine Dexter McCormick's (B.S. 1906) involvement with the birth control pill. She holds a Masters in Literature and Creative Writing from Harvard.

Eric Grunwald is director of and lecturer in MIT’s English Language Studies (ELS) program. An instructor in ELS since 2012, he draws on a wide breadth of scholastic and vocational experiences to help students across the disciplines improve their academic and professional communication skills. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, studied math, physics, computer science, and astronomy before switching to the humanities and graduating with a degree in history. He began teaching English in Berlin, Germany, during the German Reunification, and then worked for several years in technology transfer at Stanford before obtaining his master’s in creative writing at Boston University. (See ericgrunwald.com.) After serving as managing editor at the literary journal Agni, he returned to teaching in 2007 and now teaches a variety of communication courses for bilingual MIT undergraduates and graduate students. He presents regularly at conferences in the U.S. and abroad and has received Institute grants to design an undergraduate creative writing course just for bilingual students and to design a website—writingprocess.mit.edu—to instruct students in a formal writing process. Grunwald became ELS director in July 2022 and serves on the CMS/W Writing Council. He is also a member-at-large for TESOL’s Higher Education Interest Section.

Louise Harrison Lepera has taught writing at MIT since 2002. She currently teaches CI-HW classes on Contemporary Rhetoric and Autobiographical Writing in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program and also partners with other SHASS instructors as a CI-H Writing Advisor. Louise is also a co-editor of Angles, a collection of the best pieces from introductory writing courses at MIT. She holds a B.A. in American Studies and English from the University of Hull in the U.K. and an M.A. in English from Boston University, where she also completed Ph.D. coursework in Literature. Her research interests include writing pedagogy, autobiographical genres, the interactions of place and cartography with literary texts, and early twentieth-century British Literature. When she’s not working at MIT, Louise likes to spend time with her family, volunteer at her local youth theatre, take art classes, and knit.

Robert A. Irwin studied philosophy at Princeton University and Antioch College and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University. He has taught at Tufts, Brandeis, and Holy Cross and, for twenty years, at MIT's Writing and Communication Center. His book Building a Peace System was praised for its scope and clarity. "If it stimulates thought and action, the possibilities for human survival will be enhanced" (Noam Chomsky).

Nora Jackson teaches a CI-HW course in Writing Memoir, and co-taught a course in Design Writing at the Media Lab. She also serves as writing advisor in a variety of communication-intensive courses in the humanities, philosophy and linguistics, and sciences/engineering. Before joining MIT, Nora taught British Romanticism and Academic Writing at the University of Brussels, and also served as an editor and translator of academic publications. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in Germanic Languages from the University of Brussels, with a double major in English and Dutch Literature and Linguistics. Her research interests include British Romantic literature, French Modernism, Dutch literature, aesthetics, and writing about design.

Mikael Jakobsson conducts research at the intersection of game design and game culture. With a foundation in interaction design, he investigates how gaming activities fit into social and cultural practices, and how this knowledge can inform the design and development process. His research has partly been supported by research grants involving collaboration with the game industry. He is currently involved in creating a research strategy for the MIT Game Lab where he also is teaches classes in game studies and game design. He has nearly twenty years of experience in teaching, course development, research project management, establishing external funding and collaboration, as well as advising master’s and PhD students.

Elena Kallestinova is Director of the Writing and Communication Center at MIT and teaches Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication classes. She came to MIT after working for twelve years at Yale University, where she founded and expanded the Graduate Writing Center and served as Assistant Dean for Writing and Communication in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has trained, taught, and mentored diverse student populations for more than twenty years and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Consortium on Graduate Communication. With a Ph.D. in Linguistics and an M.A. in TESOL from the University of Iowa and an M.A./B.A. in Computational Linguistics from Moscow State Linguistic University, Elena has significant experience working with international and multilingual students and scholars. She seeks to promote written and oral communication programming to the MIT academic community.

Elena Kalodner-Martin is a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. She earned her Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2024 and is the 2025 recipient of the CCCCs Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication.

Her teaching and research is broadly focused on understanding and interrogating the values, norms, and discourses in technical and scientific communities. Her work has recently been published in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Professional Communication, Technical Communication, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and elsewhere."

Andreas Karatsolis joined MIT in the Fall of 2013 as the Associate Director of Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication, after spending five years in Qatar with Carnegie Mellon University. His disciplinary training includes a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication with an emphasis on technical/professional communication in science-related fields, which is at the core of his teaching and research efforts. In his new role at MIT and as a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, he is primarily interested in designing curricula and tools which can help engineers and scientists develop life-long competencies in communication. In the past seven years he has also been the Lead of co-Principal Investigator in projects related to the design, implementation and assessment of learning technologies, especially in the domains of language learning, health communication and public discourse. As a native of Greece (and a reader of Ancient Greek texts), he also enjoys conversations on Classical Rhetoric and its relationship to contemporary scientific communication.

A. C. Kemp has been a lecturer in English Language Studies since 2007. She teaches classes to bilingual students in both written and oral communication, including freshman writing, public speaking, writing papers for publication, and teacher training for international teaching assistants (ITAs). She holds degrees in English Literature (BA, 1987) and Applied Linguistics (MA, 2005), both from the University of Massachusetts. Before joining MIT, she taught at the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs (CELOP) at Boston University. Prior to teaching, she worked in film and video production, graphic design and software training.

Kemp has written over 300 columns on slang and colloquial language for Slang City since 2002, and her humor book on obscure vocabulary, The Perfect Insult for Every Occasion: Lady Snark's Guide to Common Discourtesy, was published by Adams Media in March 2008. In 2020 and 2021, she wrote a monthly blog on ESL teaching strategies for the international organization Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). From 2016 to 2020, she wrote and produced The User-Friendly Classroom, a series of instructional videos for ITAs available on MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

Shariann Lewitt is the author of seventeen novels and about forty short stories. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Irene Maksymjuk is a Lecturer in the Writing and Communication Center, English Language Studies, and the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. She combines theoretical interests with a practical commitment to facilitating clear academic and professional communication, particularly across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries. She grew up bilingual and bicultural and has taught writing as well as English as an Additional Language for a variety of (usually specialized) purposes, trained teachers, and developed orientation and training programs in academic and professional settings. Irene has a Bachelor’s in History from Georgetown, a Master’s in Applied Linguistics/TESOL from UPenn (where she also completed all but thesis in the Annenberg Master’s program in Communication), and a Ph.D. in Sociology of Communication from Boston University. She is a faithful (though often chagrined) follower of current events, and a fan of movies on the big screen.

G. R. Marvez is an education technology researcher and designer interested in classroom conversations. As a researcher, their work focuses on helping teachers prepare to facilitate difficult classroom discussions through digital conversation simulators with the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT. Marvez aims to prime all teachers for leading engaging discussions with their students.

During their undergrad, Marvez taught in Russia with Global Teaching Labs and in Cambridge public and charter schools as a part of MIT’s teacher education program. As a student teacher, they have worked in 12th grade English and 8th grade science classes. Marvez has earned a Bachelor of Science in Brain and Cognitive Sciences with a Concentration in Education from MIT.

Outside of academia and the classroom, Marvez enjoys interactive fiction, creating puzzles, and designing haunted houses.

Michael Maune (Ph.D., Purdue University) is a lecturer for the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP)​ program. His teaching focus is on developing writing pedagogy applications informed by rhetoric and applied linguistics. He was previously a post-doctoral research associate at Carnegie-Mellon University in Qatar, where he researched teaching interventions for writing in Information Systems and Organizational Behavior. His research interests include applied corpus linguistics for writing instruction, experimental and applied functional linguistics, and analysis of knowledge practices through Legitimation Code Theory.

Megan McNamara (also published under M. M. Dawley) teaches in the Writing and Communication Center and the Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication Program at MIT. She earned her doctorate from the American & New England Studies program at Boston University. Her work focuses on the literary history of the Gilded Age in the United States with an emphasis on satire. She was named to the inaugural cohort of Affiliated Faculty at BU’s Center for Antiracist Research and collaborated with Gene Andrew Jarrett on the creation of the African American Studies module for Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her writing appears in American Literary Realism and the Edith Wharton Review, and she is the book review editor for The Mark Twain Annual as well as the executive director of the Mark Twain Circle of America.

Janis Melvold (Ph.D., Linguistics, MIT) is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication. She teaches in the First Year Writing Program, as well as in communication-intensive courses in both the humanities and sciences/engineering. Prior to joining the writing and communications program at MIT, she served as a Lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching courses on linguistics and reading, and served as Co-Principal Investigator on a long-term research project investigating language disorders in the Dept. of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Her work has been published in Cortex, Brain and Language, and Aphasiology, as well as the Boston Globe. Her current research interests involve connections between linguistics and writing. Her teaching interests lie especially in the realm of science writing—in helping students discover the joys of writing through writing about the areas of science and engineering they’re most passionate about.

Rachel E. Molko is a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. She earned her Ph.D. in English in 2023 from Northeastern University, specializing in writing and rhetoric. Her research centers feminist rhetorics in popular culture with a focus on rhetorics of femininity. Since 2016, she has held teaching and administrative positions in writing programs at Northeastern University, Emmanuel College, and University of Central Florida. Leading up to her Ph.D., she earned a Bachelor’s in Editing, Writing, and Media and a Master’s in Rhetoric and Composition. Dr. Molko currently serves on the board for both the Boston Rhetoric and Writing Network and the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality. Outside of work, she enjoys watching Jeopardy! with her partner, practicing hot vinyasa, and spending time with her cats.

Her work is featured in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition.

Kate Parsons is a Lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP). She has taught and tutored writing at many Boston-area universities, including five years with MIT’s Writing and Communication Center. With WRAP, she teaches in a range of CI-Ms in mechanical engineering and computer science and CI-Hs in political science and public policy. Her pedagogical interests include Rhetorical Genre Theory and second-language writing/reading. She holds an MA in literature from Tufts University and a MATESOL from Salem State University.

Thomas Pickering is a Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication Program. He holds a Ph.D in rhetoric and composition from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His teaching and research lies in intellectual property, writing practices in the computing professions, and technical and professional communication broadly. He has taught writing in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and technical writing programs. His published work studies political economies of writing amidst changing technological environments, including Web 2.0, the era of "big data," and generative language models.

Sophia (Sophie) Richardson is a Lecturer in the Writing and Communication Center. She is committed to exploring the intersection of the humanities and new technologies, using new platforms to propel learning, teaching, and research. After obtaining her B.A. in comparative literature from Oberlin College, she went on to complete a Ph.D. in English literature at Yale University, where she specialized in early modern British literature (1500-1700) at the intersection of poetry and science. She would love to work with you to help you optimize concision, precision, and flow as you write and revise. Many years of both teaching first-year writing at Brandeis and Yale and consulting in the Yale Graduate Writing Lab have given her the taste for working with writers both brand new and highly seasoned in a wide variety of disciplines and genres. She welcomes clients at all stages of writing and is open to all kinds of projects, from coursework essays to dissertation chapters, personal statements to grant proposals, presentations to popular science articles.

Leslie Ann Roldan, Ph.D., is a Lecturer II in MIT's Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program, and co-author of Writing in Biology: A Brief Guide (Oxford University Press, 2016). She holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Biology from MIT, where she trained with Tania Baker. ​Since 2005, she has been teaching communication-intensive courses in the MIT Departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Brain & Cognitive Sciences. Her current scholarly research focuses on developing pedagogical tools to help students write literature reviews and understand the logic of their disciplines. Her nonacademic interests include cooking, learning jazz, and enjoying the outdoors.

Susan Ruff has been teaching technical communication at MIT since the spring of 2003. Most of her teaching has been in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, although she has also taught in Courses 2, 6, 7, and 20. Her research interests include mathematical communication pedagogy and the communication of software engineers in industry.

When not at MIT, she is often traveling to climb rock and ice.

Ardalan SadeghiKivi is an Iranian artist, writer, educator, and computer programmer based in the United States. He holds an M.Arch from MIT and a B.Sc from the University of Tehran. His projects examine how computing distorts and manipulates senses and beliefs by dissecting the algorithmic-thinking threads woven into culturally contextualized systems—tracing how their protocols in relation to visual and informational structures of everyday life are manifested materially, framed by institutions, and conditioned by ideologies.

He has exhibited internationally, and his recent work is included, among other places, in the Cukrarna Cultural Center, the Museum of Modern Art in Slovenia, and the Olomouc Museum in the Czech Republic. He also served as the co-editor of the 50th issue of Thresholds, MIT Press’s peer-reviewed journal of art and architecture. And, he has been the Liaison to MIT.nano, where he has played a key role in developing its premier program for integrating the arts and humanities with cutting-edge technologies and research spaces.

Juergen Schoenstein joined the WRAP team as a lecturer in 2011, after more than a quarter century working as a professional writer. He became an "accidental journalist" after earning his graduate degree in Geography at Technische Universitaet Munich in 1985; five years later, he found himself in New York City, where for the next two decades he covered current affairs, business and politics, as well as science and technology, for some of Germany's largest newspapers and magazines. Apart from teaching at MIT, he is also the editor-in-chief of Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, a monthly science review magazine (now in its 75th year) that is published by Konradin Media Group in Germany.

Greg Schwanbeck is a visiting lecturer for MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, teaching a three-course sequence in educational theory and practice (11.129-131). Greg draws on his more than 15 years of experience as a high school Physics teacher to inform his work in teacher training.

In addition to his role with MIT, Greg works full-time at Westwood High School, where he teaches Physics and Astronomy to grades 11 and 12 and serves as an instructional technology coach tasked with helping colleagues capitalize on the district’s 1-to-1 Chromebook program.

Greg is an Apple Distinguished Educator, a Google Educator, and a US Department of State Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. Greg’s teaching methods and thoughts on educational technology have been featured nationally in publications such as The Huffington Post, EdSurge, and American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom by Katrina Fried.

Greg earned his master’s degree in Technology, Innovation, and Education at Harvard University and earned his bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics at Union College.

Pamela Siska has been with MIT's Writing and Communication Center since 1993, and she was a contributor to the MIT-authored The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing. For the past ten years, she has also taught graduate writing classes for MIT's Supply Chain Management program. Pamela holds an M.A. in English from Boston University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pretoria. She has published articles on medieval and Victorian literature, but her area of specialization is Romanticism. Her chapter on Mary Shelley and material objects appears in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Ashgate, 2009), and her dissertation explores the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Susan Spilecki teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University. She has an MFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and an MA in Theological Studies. Her work has been published in Potomac Review, Ekphrasis, Princetown Arts Review, Quarterly West and Frontiers. As a prolific writer, she is fascinated by helping people, as the writer David Huddle says, "achieve a circumstance of ongoing work, the serenity to carry out the daily writing and revising of what... [works] are given one to write."

Kristen Starkowski completed her Ph.D. in English at Princeton University in 2021. Before coming to MIT, she taught at the Harvard College Writing Program. Currently, she is working on a mixed-methods study about students’ experiences with writing in STEM. Her other research focuses on minor characters in the Victorian novel and proposes a new methodology of reading for the various networks of survival and subsistence in the nineteenth-century social and economic world. Kristen's work has appeared in Composition Forum, Discourse and Writing, Novel, Victorian Review, and other outlets. She is an active member of the Boston-area writing community and serves on the BRAWN Board of Governors.

Jessie Stickgold-Sarah is a Lecturer II in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication. She enjoys systems and interdisciplinary investigation. She teaches communication in the departments of EECS, AeroAstro, and BE, as well as first-year composition. Her research examines how communication and disciplinary reasoning & knowledge are intertwined. Previously, she worked as a network engineer in Silicon Valley research labs, and her dissertation studied the use of genetic language in fiction. Outside of work, Jessie enjoys plants, TV, hiking with her perfect dog Jolene (pictured), and at least one board game.

Olivia Szabo is a lecturer in the English Language Studies program. She enjoys sharing her passion for language learning through teaching many aspects of English as an international language. She has taught academic and professional English in various programs at several universities around the US, including the University of Washington in Seattle and Boston University. Olivia’s first language is Hungarian, and she has also studied several other languages in addition to English. She loves swimming, traveling, hiking and trying different cuisines. She received her first graduate degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Veszprém (now Pannon) University in Hungary and her other MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kate Tarker is a lecturer in CMS/W and Music & Theater Arts. She's a practicing playwright who grew up bilingually in Germany. Kate is currently working on a climate crisis play through the Next Forever Initiative: a commission and residency with Princeton University's High Meadows Environmental Institute, The Lewis Center for the Arts, and The Civilians. Kate's produced plays include Montag (Soho Rep., Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe), THUNDERBODIES (Soho Rep.), Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man (The Wilma, FoolsFURY), and Laura and the Sea (Rivendell Theatre Ensemble). The press has called her work "brilliant + highbrow" (New York Magazine), "staggeringly original" (The San Francisco Chronicle), and "screamingly funny" (The New York Times). Her plays have been developed in theaters all over the US and in London, at The Vineyard Theatre, The Wilma, Ars Nova, New York Theatre Workshop, The Playwrights' Center, The Lark, Soho Rep., Theatre503, and The O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, among others. She is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship, The Vineyard's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, Theater Masters' Visionary Playwright Award, and the Kennedy Center's National Science Playwriting Award. Kate has completed residencies at MacDowell Colony, Tofte Lake Center, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. Her writing has also been published in The Paris Review and in the McSweeney's anthology, I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze is a Lecturer II in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Northeastern University. At MIT, she teaches writing and communication in a range of CI-M’s, from mechanical engineering, to computer science, to AeroAstro. Teaching and research interests include rhetoric and writing studies, collaboration, affect, new materialism, and nineteenth century culture. She also does improv comedy, and loves bringing the “yes, and” mindset into all of her classes.

Michael Trice joined Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication as a lecturer in 2013. He has taught technical communication, composition, and usability at The University of North Texas and the University of Leeds. Prior to teaching, Michael spent 15 years in industry working with companies like Apple, Wizards of the Coast, and SXSW Interactive.

Kim Vaeth teaches in WRAP CI Humanities courses and has taught poetry and fiction courses in Literature. She is the author of a book of poems, Her Yes (Zoland Books). Her commissioned poetic texts for orchestra include Elegies for mezzo soprano Frederica von Stade, which premiered at Carnegie Hall with the Jacksonville Symphony, later recorded by the London Philharmonic for Sony Classical, and American Requiem, performed by the Pacific Symphony, later recorded by Reference Records.

She was one of the original "Explainers" at the San Francisco Exploratorium – Frank Oppenheimer's interactive science museum. While living in Stockholm, she wrote “Life After the Nobels” for a book chapter on the Nobel Prize (Tekknowledge). She has taught MIT marine biologists aboard research cruises in the North Atlantic and field investigators at the EPA.

Andrea Walsh, a historical sociologist, teaches in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and in Women's and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests center on gender, social movements, and media culture in the U.S.

Jeanne Wildman teaches within WRAP, primarily as a writing advisor in humanities, arts, and social science courses. Prior to joining MIT in 2007, she worked in environmental protection and policy development. Outside interests include textile arts, folk and theater music, and habitat gardening.

Jason Wiser teaches the CMS/W courses Art of Comic Book Writing and Making Comics and Sequential Art. He teaches Animation and Game Design at Harvard and Tufts Universities and has taught master classes at Pixar Animation Studios. His 3D Art and Animation have appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, on the Disney/ABC Family show “Greek,” in Warehouse VR simulations for Pitney Bose, and on robots at the MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robotic Group. His comics have been published in the Boston Globe and collections by the Boston Comics Roundtable. His published games and interactive projects include "Slam Bolt Scrappers" by Fire Hose Games, "Dance Central" by Harmonix, museum exhibits in Switzerland, and the Mixed Reality Engineering Project at Northeastern University. He holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Emerson College and a Bachelors of Art from Wesleyan University. He hosts a Comics and Animation Portfolio at madwomb.com.