Coordinators
Linda Hirsch, Professor in the English Department at Hostos Community College/CUNY, has been coordinator of the Hostos WAC/RAC Initiative since its inception in 1999. Her areas of interest include language and literacy of both native and non-native speakers of English and children’s literature. She received her BA in English from City College/CUNY, her MA in English Literature from SUNY Stony Brook and her PhD in English Education from New York University. Her research on WAC and the language and cognitive needs of ELLs across the curriculum has appeared in journals and collections including Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places; Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and Writing Across the Curriculum in Community Colleges. She is a former president of the CUNY ESL Council and Writing Centers Association and currently hosts EdCast, a TV program airing throughout New York City on CUNY TV that examines issues in education. She has been co-coordinating the Hostos WAC/RAC Initiative with Professor Andrea Fabrizio since 2009.
Sean Gerrity received his Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2017 and joined Hostos as Assistant Professor of English that same year. He was formerly a Writing Fellow at Hostos from 2014-2016 while completing his graduate studies and joined Prof. Hirsch as WAC Co-Coordinator in Fall 2022. At Hostos, Sean has helped lead the English department’s redesign of its developmental courses and curriculum and serves as a course manager and a member of the department curriculum committee. Sean is also a senator, serves on the senate admissions and retention committee, the POINT committee, and was a member of the Middle States working group on ethics and integrity. He has also previously served as a faculty advisor to the Hostos Writing Center. His research on slavery and literature has been supported by grants from CUNY and from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and has appeared in various academic books and journals.
Current Fellows
Carlos G. Espinal is a doctoral student in Spanish at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spanish-language print culture in New York City and the Caribbean. He enjoys biking around the city, doing archival research at the NYPL, and teaching Spanish at CCNY.
Maggie Fife is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center working in ethics and social epistemology. She is currently focusing on the role of imagination and hope in moral revolutions, looking specifically at the movement for prison abolition in the United States. This is her second year as a WAC Fellow at Hostos, and has really appreciated the opportunity to work across disciplines on writing pedagogy.
Pamela Franciotti is a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include second language (L2) acquisition, psycholinguistics and experimental syntax. She is currently conducting her dissertation research that investigates the interaction between L2 grammar and L2 sentence processing strategies in L1 English-L2 Italian learners. Pamela holds a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature and a M.A. in Linguistics, both from the University of Siena, Italy. She has experience teaching Linguistics (at Lehman College and Queens College) and Italian (at Vassar College in US and asylum seekers centers in Italy) and previously worked as a WAC fellow at CUNY SPS. In her free time, Pamela enjoys film photography, watching classic Italian movies, traveling, and collecting vinyls.
Tamara Maatouk is a Ph.D. candidate in the history program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She focuses on the interpenetration of Egyptian cinema and twentieth-century politics as well as the use of films as serious vehicles for understanding, conceptualizing, and reconstructing the past. She is the author of Understanding the Public Sector in Egyptian Cinema: A State Venture, Cairo Papers in Social Science 35:3 (Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2019).
Casandra R. Murray is Ph.D. student in the English Department at The CUNY Graduate Center. She has been teaching as an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department at Hunter College for nearly a decade with a focus on composition, introduction to literature, and postcolonial studies courses. This is her second year as a WAC Fellow, and she is grateful for all that she has learned from the amazing Hostos faculty, students, and WAC coordinators.
Teófilo Reis is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at University of Campinas, Brazil. He is interested in philosophy of race, social epistemology, social theory, Brazilian social thinking, political philosophy, and intellectual history. In addition, he has expertise in mathematical logic, although he doesn’t do logic professionally anymore (but he still enjoys recreational math).
Past Fellows
2017-2018
Eylul Fidan Akinci
Dainy Bernstein
Shelley Buchbinder
Nora Goldman
Sara Rychtarik
Yuko Shiratori
2016-2017
Jennifer Hamano
Elliott Liu
Jessica Mahlbacher
Lauren Spradlin
Rose Tomassi
Nicole Webb
2015-2016
Sean Gerrity
Jennifer Hamano
Elliott Liu
Evangelia–Lydia Manatou
Rebecca Salois
Danielle Stewart
Mercedes Vega Villar
Nicole Webb
2014-2015
Janne Gillespie
Emmy Williamson
Rebecca Salois
Fang Xu
Ryan DeChant
Sean Gerrity
2013-2014
Jeremy Greenfield
Pablo Guerra
David Houpt
David Monaghan
Preeti Sampat
Rebecca Traynor
2012-2013
Mary Hubbell
Stephen Ruszcyk
Laura Paskell-Brown
RobertCastle
Elan Abrell
Emily Curtin
2011-2012
Shana Lessing
Monica Steinberg
Ryan Bazinet
Sophia Bishop
Kendra Brewster
Edwin Mayorga
2010-2011
Mark Alfano
Angelina Tallaj
Sarah Archino
Christopher Swift
Elisa Legon
Tudor Protopopescu
2009-2010
Mark Alfano
Adriana Perez
Sarah Archino
Christopher Swift
Elisa Legon
Tudor Protopopescu
2008-2009
Adriana Perez
Anamaria Flores
Dave Pier
Kate Wilson
Mayida Zaal
Roderick Graham
