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.

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.

Nikita Bezrukov spends most of his time puzzling over the architecture of language. With an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, he asks what we actually assemble when we speak. Do we build sentences out of words, or words out of sentences, fitting tiny morphemes into pronounceable units along the way. And could the writing systems we use to capture speech be little more than systematic find and replace operations on our phonological output.

To look for answers, Nikita gathers evidence where language is lived: working with speakers of endangered languages in the Armenian and Georgian highlands, filling notebooks in Istanbul cafés, and talking with diaspora communities over mantı in Watertown. These materials feed his theoretical work on how different layers of linguistic structure interlock. You might also find him at the Museum of Fine Arts studying a hieroglyphic inscription.

At MIT he co-teaches communication intensive courses for engineers and computer scientists, along with classes in linguistics. Before arriving in Cambridge, he taught and conducted research at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Princeton University.

Katie P. Bruner (PhD, Illinois) is an award-winning teacher and writer whose work focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and public life. She has extensive experience communicating complex ideas to diverse audiences and teaching others to do the same. She has taught courses across rhetoric and communication, and completed a dissertation on early media research at MIT in 2021. Her writing has appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, and The Quarterly Journal of Speech. Originally from Austin, TX, she enjoys live theater, cocktails, and biking around Cambridge.

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).

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 is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Comparative Media Studies, where he taught courses in digital humanities, media and museum studies. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne and the Technical University of Aachen in Germany, as well as at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and served as a Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in 2001.

Formerly the Executive Director of MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, Fendt is currently co–Principal Investigator of the Connected History Project (CHiP)/Lumina at the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. CHiP is developing an AI-supported research platform for historians, with a particular focus on historical documents from the German occupation of Prague. He has also served as co–Principal Investigator of the NEH-funded “Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students,” the “US–Iran – Missed Opportunities” project, and several other digital humanities initiatives. In addition, 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 À la rencontre de Philippe (CD-ROM). In 2005, he founded the MIT Short Film Festival, which he directed until 2016.

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

Elizabeth works in MIT's Writing and Communication Center and as a freelance editor. She has taught WGS.101, Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, and been a Writing Advisor for Introduction to World Music and Introduction to Western Music, among others. She is on the board 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.

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.

Matthew Halm is a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. Prior to teaching at MIT, he has taught courses in composition, rhetorical criticism, writing theory, media studies, film studies, and technical and professional communication. His research interests include environmental rhetoric, new materialism, and infrastructural approaches to theorizing media.

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, since 2000, 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.

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.

Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling novelist and comic book writer. Her work at Marvel includes X-23, Black Widow, Han Solo, Dark Wolverine, and Astonishing X-Men, for which she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. She is also the co-creator of Monstress from Image Comics (with Sana Takeda). The ongoing series has won multiple Hugo Awards, British Fantasy Awards, the Harvey Award, the World Fantasy Award, and seven Eisner Awards. Liu was the first woman in the thirty-year history of the Eisners to win an award in the Best Writer category. Her latest work is The Wingbearer Saga for middle-grade readers — as well as the Eisner-award winning Night Eaters series, an Asian American horror-comedy trilogy.

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.

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.

Micah Nathan is the internationally best-selling author of Gods of Aberdeen (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and Losing Graceland (Random House, 2011), novels that sold over 200,000 copies worldwide and received critical acclaim from The Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, Kirkus, The Boston Globe, Publisher’s Weekly, and more. His short stories and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Skeptical Inquirer, and others. He is a recipient of Boston University’s Saul Bellow Prize for Fiction, an Innovative Fiction Award, and the Associated Press Short Essay Award. His short stories have been selected for Best American Mystery Stories and other anthologies.

In 2021 Micah co-founded a video game studio, where his role as Chief Narrative Officer contributed to a $7M raise. His work as a lead writer/narrative designer includes Shadowgun (Unity’s Game of the Year) and top-grossing mobile titles that have generated over $75M in sales. He has also worked as a script doctor, refining screenplays for Dimension Films and indie studios.

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.

John Picker teaches courses in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century media and literature. His interests include Victorian and transatlantic studies, auditory culture, and media history. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes. (Read more about the book in a blog entry at The Paris Review.) He is also a contributor to The Sound Studies Reader, Sound Studies in the series Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. His essay "Two National Anthems" was published in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, which was on several best-of-the-year lists (Salon, NPR, Time Out New York, Boston Phoenix). His other writing includes chapters in Sounds of Modern History, The Victorian World, Walt Whitman and Modern Music, and Shakespearean Criticism, and articles in The American Scholar, New Literary History, ELH, and Victorian Studies. He was a member of the founding editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which began publication with Routledge in 2016. He has been invited to speak on such topics as "AL, or Artificial Listening" at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, "His Monster's Voice" at the Stanford Humanities Center, "The Telephone Booth, Noise, and Public Privacy" at the Yale School of Architecture, "Reading the Atlantic Cable" at University College Dublin, "Auditory Anxieties and Modernity" at the Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences, "Transatlantic Acousmatics" at MIT's Comparative Media Studies colloquium, and London street cries for the Modern Language Association's "What's the Word?" radio series. He can be seen and heard in "The Whole Wired World," from the exhibit Wired: A World Transformed by the Telegraph at the Maihaugan Gallery at MIT.

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.

Rob Rowan is a Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program. He has worked as a writer, teacher, database designer, and business owner. He holds a doctorate in English Studies (Technical Communication) from Illinois State University. Before coming to MIT, Rob taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His interests include open source projects, humor and its uses, creative writing, video games, science fact and fiction, computer programming, neuroscience and adult education, technical communication pedagogy, and contemporary politics and culture. He specializes in teaching technical and professional communication to STEM majors. Rob has the good fortune to live with the two best dogs in the world.

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.

Greg Schwanbeck is a lecturer in MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, where he teaches the three-course sequence in educational theory and practice (CMS.591-593). He also teaches AP Physics and Astronomy at Westwood High School, where he also serves as an instructional technology coach. His research interests include methods for using generative AI to support differentiated instruction and best practices in constructivist, student-centered STEM education. Greg has been recognized as an Apple Distinguished Educator, Google Educator, and U.S. Department of State Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. He holds an M.Ed. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University and bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics from 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 ten years she 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, which she is expanding into a book, 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.

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.

Adrienne Tierney is a Lecturer at the Writing and Communication Center. She also provides writing instruction and support for professionals in biotech and medicine. Before coming to MIT, she taught many graduate and undergraduate classes on writing, psychology, cognitive science, emotion, and human development at Harvard. She has an Ed.D. in human development and education and an Ed.M. in mind, brain, and education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a M.S. in neuroscience from the Sorbonne, and a B.A in neuroscience and science in society from Wesleyan University. Her dissertation research was conducted at Boston Children’s Hospital and examined developmental trajectories in brain and cognitive development of infants at risk for autism. Adrienne’s professional interests are primarily in how writing is a means of developing critical thinking and reasoning skills.

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.

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.

Karen Weintraub is a science journalist writing regularly for The New York Times, Scientific American, Technology Review and other news outlets, as well as teaching journalism. In her spare time, she is co-writing a book for MIT Press on the history of Cambridge, MA. She has a a BA in Urban Studies and Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in political science from the University of Houston, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which helped turn her into a science geek.

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.