Manu Samriti Chander, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University-Newark

Wendell Cooper, Lecturer, Department of Music, Theatre & Dance, Lehman College

Johanna Folk, Post Doctoral Fellow, University of California-San Francisco

Julie Goldscheid, Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law

Devin Griffiths, Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California

Vani Kannan, Assistant Professor of English, Lehman College

Makeba Lavan, Doctoral Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center

Afrodesia McCannon, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, New York University

Patricia Matthew, Associate Professor of English, Montclair State University

Olivia Loksing Moy, Assistant Professor of English, Lehman College

Mario Moore, Hodder Fellow, Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts

Jennifer Rhodes, Lecturer in Literature Humanities, Columbia University

Marco Ramírez Rojas, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Lehman College

Eugenia Zuroski, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Dhipinder Walia, Lecturer in English, Lehman College

Ashely N. Davis, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Jennifer Chang, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Shyrlene Hernandez, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Sharon Lee, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Alexis Martinez, Student Panelist, Lehman Collge

Javiera Morales-Reyes, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Hardik Yadav, Student Panelist, Lehman College

Manu Samriti Chander is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD from Brown University. His first monograph, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2017), examined the appropriation of British Romantic tropes by colonial poets throughout the nineteenth century. He has also edited a collection of short fiction by the nineteenth-century Guyanese author, Egbert Martin (Caribbean Press, 2014), and co-edited, with Tricia A. Matthew, a special issue of European Romantic Review on generic experimentation in Romantic abolitionist literature. Professor Chander is currently working on The Collected Works of Egbert Martin, with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant, and developing a second monograph, Art Fights: Aesthetic Controversy and the Lessons of Modernity, which traces a trajectory from the controversial poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the films of Griffith and Kubrick and the novels of Nabokov and Rushdie.

Jennifer Chang is an English major with a minor in Early Childhood and Childhood Education at Lehman College, CUNY. She is a member of the English Honors Department and has held the school’s highest honor as a Presidential Scholar since 2017. She is also a math tutor with the CUNY Tutor Corps program and works alongside public high school teachers to help improve students’ success in mathematics. A fellow of the CUNY Pipeline Program, Jennifer has been working with mentors at CUNY’s Graduate Center as part of an initiative to prepare students in underrepresented groups to pursue doctoral degrees. Jennifer plans to continue developing her passion for education after graduating and is a semi-finalist for both Teach for America and Fulbright.

Before deciding to turn her passion for education into a career, Jennifer spent more than 15 years in the private sector, working in equity research and litigation.

Mx. Oops (aka Wendell Cooper) is a New York-based transmedia artist with a focus on multimedia performance, urban dance, and queer mysticism. Their work centers hybridity, combining: dance, video design, costume, and rap. A certified yoga instructor (500hr RYT) and practitioner of Thai Yoga Massage, they are also trained in various forms of energy healing. Their work has toured across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mx. Oops studied dance and religion at the George Washington University and completed an Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College. They currently teach in Lehman College’s Dance (BA) and Multimedia Performing Arts (BFA) Programs part of the City University of New York.

Ashley N. Davis is an English Honors Student at Lehman College where she is pursuing her English degree and completed a research project on the inclusion of fan fiction in the canon. She came to New York from Georgia and has a passion for the art of storytelling. She began her own journey as a storyteller over fifteen years ago when she discovered she had a knack for fiction writing. Ashley hopes to one day publish a novel born from her overactive imagination. 

Johanna Folk received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from George Mason University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Folk’s primary research centers on understanding and reducing mental illness and health risk behavior associated with criminal justice system involvement, focusing on the role of interpersonal relationships and leveraging family support to improve outcomes. In her spare time, Dr. Folk volunteers with MeTooSTEM, serving as a social media and public relations coordinator and curator of survivors’ stories for metoostem.com.

Julie Goldscheid is a Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law, where she served as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2015-2017 and where she teaches subjects including civil procedure, lawyering, and courses on gender and law, and where she helped develop the Family Law Practice Clinic. Her scholarship focuses on gender equality, with a particular focus on gender-based violence and economic equality.

Devin Griffiths is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His research examines the intersection of intellectual history, scientific literature, and the digital humanities, with emphasis on nineteenth-century British literature and science. Central to his work is the question of how literary form shapes our experience of time and natural systems. His first book, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins, 2016), was shortlisted for book prized by the British Society of Literature and Science and the British Association for Romantic Studies. In it, he rethinks analogy in order to examine how historical novels furnished a relational understanding of history and helped to shape the disciplinary formations of both the life sciences and the humanities. He is currently working on a new book, The Ecology of Form, that studies the relation between ecology, racial science and debates over literary form, and a second book, The Ecology of Power, that explores the energetic economies of literary genres.

Shyrlene Hernandez is pursuing a degree in Nursing at Lehman College. Her academic interests include the history of reproductive health laws and policies and parental consent and abortion. She hopes to help minors understand their family planning options given the limited resources available. In fact, she believes nurses play a big role in educating minors about their reproductive health which is why she plans on becoming a nurse at a pediatric center.

Vani Kannan, is an interdisciplinary scholar of writing studies, rhetoric, and women’s and gender studies, Vani Kannan researches writing across contexts (academic disciplines, workplaces, communities), multimodal/multigenre composition, and transnational/women-of-color feminisms. Her work has appeared in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture and Studies on Asia, and is forthcoming in the edited collection The Political Turn in the Trump Era: Writing, Democracy, Activism. Additionally, she has co-authored articles for Journal of Writing Assessment, Community Literacy Journal, Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Journal of Academic Freedom. She is currently developing a book project on the Third World Women’s Alliance, a group that organized against racism, sexism, and imperialism in New York City and the Bay Area during the 1970s.

Sharon Lee is a Macaulay Honors and EHP senior studying English Literature at Lehman College. In addition to being a CUNY Pipeline fellow, she is also a co-founder and editor of the Pipeline Journal: On The Margins. Her research interests include the history of Asian American solidarity, vegetarianism, female protest, and Asian American literature. She likes to paint and play board games in her free time.

Makeba Lavan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Generally speaking, her research focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism and Popular Culture. She has taught writing and literature courses at Lehman College since 2014.

Alexis Martinez is an English major at Lehman College as well as a full-time single mother. Her academic interests include social issues, poetry, and nonfiction writing. Last semester, Alexis researched rape culture in the U.S. and was inspired to continue this work. Alexis wants to continue creating an inclusive environment for men and women of all ages to learn about social issues that are currently plaguing our society. In the future, Alexis hopes to pursue a career in journalism.

Afrodesia McCannon A native New Yorker, Afrodesia McCannon received her PhD from University of California – Berkeley in Comparative Literature (French, English, and German) and is the current chair of the Art, Text, Media concentration of the Global Liberal Studies program at NYU. She is interested in unearthing the autobiographical impulse in the Middle Ages and uncommon expressions of medieval subjectivity. She is preparing a manuscript on the Vie de Saint Louis, by thirteenth-century author Jean de Joinville, on whom her publications have focused. The manuscript is provisionally titled “Joinville’s Project:” with something more descriptive after the colon. It argues for a reconsideration of medieval autobiography in the light of, among other things, feminist and critical race studies. She has taken part in the Fellowship of the Medievalists of Color from its inception in 2015.

Patricia Matthew is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University and writes about the history of the novel and British abolitionist literature and culture. Her work has been published in various journals and magazines including Women’s Writing, the Keats-Shelley Journal, PMLA, European Romantic Review (with Manu Chander), The Atlantic and Lapham’s Quarterly. She is currently writing a book on sugar, gender, and protests in nineteenth-century literature. She is also a specialist in diversity and inclusion in higher education and the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths ofTenure (UNC Press, 2016).

Javiera Morales-Reyes is a senior at Lehman College in the Macaulay Honors Program, double majoring in Honors English Literature and in History. Her areas of interest include 17th century literature mainly in England and New Spain. She is specifically interested in John Milton, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, theology, mythopoesis, and the concepts of silence, speech, gender politics, and religious institutions. Her current thesis looks at two women, Elizabeth Cary and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and their fictional and nonfictional defiance of patriarchal and absolute powers in both secular and religious contexts. She hopes to expand this work to include the effects of the religious civil wars of the 17th century, as well as the rising figures at the end of the century that continue to shape the narrative of humanism.

Olivia Loksing Moy is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Lehman College, CUNY where she is director of the English Honors Program. Her research interests include Romantic, Victorian and Modernist poetry, poetic theory, and Gothic literature. She is an organizing member of the Victorianist Collective and, along with Dhipinder Walia, serves as a coordinator for this year’s Activism in Academia symposium.

Jennifer Rhodes is a Robert Belknap Core Faculty Fellow at Columbia University, where she teaches literature and runs an experimental narrative arts workshop, Core Lab. Jennifer holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature; her primary area of focus is the intersection of text and the visual and performing arts. Her current book project examines the influence of Richard Wagner on the modern novel. She spends summers on the staff of The Santa Fe Opera, where she writes subtitles and speaks frequently on opera and literature.

Marco Ramírez Rojas is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lehman College, City University of New York. He specializes in twentieth-century Latin American poetry and contemporary narratives. He is an editor for the academic journal Ciberletras and has published in several academic journals. In 2018 he co-edited the volume Narrativas del miedo: Terror en obras literarias, cinematicas y televisivas de Latinoamerica (Peter Lang). He is originally from Colombia. He holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and received his PhD. from the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Dhipinder Walia is a full-time lecturer at Lehman College CUNY with a specialization in English Composition and Asian-American literature. Her research/teaching interests include: digital composition, English acquisition post-trauma, quantitative writing, and democratic grading processes. She has received her MFA in fiction from Adelphi University and is currently working towards a Masters in Women/Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Walia has published a piece on diversity in the workplace for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Hardik Yadav is an Indian-born student of (Honors) literature. His interests lie in literary and movie criticism; ask him about Bollywood. He has appeared in The New Yorker for “taking issue with Trump’s ‘gibberish’” in their 2016 article, ‘Donald Trump vs. New York City’ by Daniel Wenger. He represented India as its Youth Ambassador in 2010-11; June 25th, 2011 was celebrated as ‘Hardik Yadav Day’ in Ossining, NY.

Eugenia Zuroski is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Her book A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and issued in paperback in 2018. She is currently working on two books: A Funny Thing: The Exotic Detail in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Disgust and Its Others in the Long Eighteenth Century.

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