Luke Waltzer
Director
Luke Waltzer is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he supports GC students in their teaching across the CUNY system and beyond, and works on a variety of pedagogical and digital projects. He previously was the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch College. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center, serves as Director of Community Projects for the CUNY Academic Commons, is a faculty member in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, and directs the development of Vocat, an open-source multimedia evaluation and assessment tool. He serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and has contributed essays to Matthew K. Gold’s Debates in the Digital Humanities and, with Thomas Harbison, to Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki’s Writing History in the Digital Age.
Cristine Khan
Program Coordinator
Cristine Khan is a 1st year Ph.D. student in the Sociology program at CUNY Graduate Center. She is interested in studying and researching the intersections of immigration, race, and education. Prior to this, Cristine worked at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs on an ESOL civics program for adult immigrants. She also has experience teaching, researching, and publishing in the field of Intercultural Education and Sociology at the Institucion Universitaria Colombo Americana in Bogota, Colombia as both a full-time instructor and Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. She holds an MSc in International Migration and Social Cohesion from the University of Amsterdam and University College Dublin, and a BA in Sociology from Wesleyan University. Outside of academia, Cristine loves to travel, explore the diversity of NYC, and spend time with her cats.
Asilia Franklin-Phipps
Lauder Post-Doctoral Fellow
Asilia Franklin-Phipps is originally from Los Angeles but has lived in Oregon for the past 7 years. After several years of teaching Asilia became interested in exploring how to better facilitate students in thinking and being in relation to race and racism in the particular context of Oregon. This ongoing and predictable pedagogical challenge became the focus of Asilia’s dissertation, which explored how arts practices and aesthetic experiences happen in relation to shifting racial discourse, political events, and digital culture, allowing future teachers to differently encounter race. Asilia continues to wonder about the possibilities of teaching and becoming more ethical in relation to new knowledge. In her time in Oregon, Asilia has learned to appreciate walks in the woods, home-brewed kombucha, maligned rituals, and swimming in lakes and rivers. Asilia has a PhD in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education from the University of Oregon.
Kaitlin Mondello
Lauder Post-Doctoral Fellow
Kaitlin Mondello received her Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 2018.Her dissertation focuses on proto-environmentalist literature, science, and philosophy in the nineteenth century and their relevance to current debates about climate change and the Anthropocene. Her teaching and research interests include the Environmental Humanities and the intersections of race, gender, and animal studies.
She has over ten years of teaching experience. As a former TLC fellow, she will continue her work in her new role with a focus on interdisciplinary teaching and research, pedagogy in the environmental and public humanities, experiential learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). Within CUNY, she has taught at Hunter College and Guttman Community College. She served as a WAC Fellow for the Environmental Justice Program at John Jay College and The School of Professional Studies at CUNY. She taught previously at Stern College for Women (Yeshiva University); Stetson University, where she also served as Co-Director of the Writing Center; and Daytona State Community College in Florida, where she is from originally.
At The Graduate Center, she founded the Ecocriticism Public Working Group through The Center for the Humanities. She has been a Mellon Interdisciplinary Science Studies Fellow, a New York Botanical Garden Humanities Institute Fellow and an Early Research Initiative Fellow in Interdisciplinary Research in the Service of Public Knowledge. Her scholarly work has appeared in Romantic Ecocriticism and Essays in Romanticism and she has blogged about teaching on HASTAC and Visible Pedagogy.
Luis Henao Uribe
Mellon Humanities Scholar, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Luis Henao Uribe is a graduate of the Ph.D. program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
His recent research explores the role of novels in the establishment of national imaginaries and the legitimization of theState in Mexico and Colombia. He also writes about how Latin American cultural objects circulate in the United States. He has been teaching both language and literature courses at CUNY since 2009, most recently at LaGuardia Community College as a Humanities Alliance Fellow.
Laurie Hurson
Open Educational Technologist
Laurie Hurson is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center. Her work explores students’ learning ecologies and how these resource networks shape student learning. She teaches “Principles of New Media” at Baruch College and has a background in faculty development programming and open source educational technology support and development. Previously, Laurie was a Graduate Fellow at the GC TLC and a Hybrid Coordinator at Baruch College’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
Mei Ling Chua
TLC Fellow
Mei Ling Chua is a doctoral student in Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center with research and pedagogical interests that include human-environment relationships, and the role of aesthetics and embodied experience in shaping our habitats and interactions. Her current research focuses on embodiment, engagement, and making in the contexts of digitization and the physical environment. Mei Ling comes to Environmental Psychology and the Teaching and Learning Center from a prior practice in Architecture. She is a Registered Architect and LEED-Accredited Professional, and holds a B.Arch. from Pennsylvania State University.
Talisa Feliciano
TLC Fellow
Talisa Feliciano (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation entitled, “Dancing in the Heart of the Empire: Youth Subway Performers 
in New York City” explores subway dancers and the politics of public space in New York’s public transit system. They received a B.A. in Anthropology from Queens College in 2012. She has worked as an adjunct educator at City College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College since 2017 teaching in the departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Latin American and Latino Studies. Their experience within CUNY as a learner and instructor has brought them to think deeply about liberation and pedagogy. She has received multiple awards including the IRADAC Fellowship, The GC Library Open Pedagogy Fellowship, and IRADAC/Schomburg Digitization Fellowship.
Outside of academia, Talisa enjoys spending time with their cat, biking, decolonizing their food systems, and strategizing on how to get free.
Kyueun Kim
TLC Fellow
Kyueun K
im is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. As a feminist, educator, and scholar, she is interested in the publicness of arts, education, and scholarship. Her research interests are: the technologies of knowledge and the racialized/gendered body, radical democracy and social performances, and the cultural productions of the East Asian urban modernities. She has been teaching Speech Communication at Baruch College as a Graduate Teaching Fellow and an adjunct since 2016 Fall. As a final project of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate, Kyueun organized a conference titled “Performing Pedagogy, Engaging Technology” in May 2019. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Korea University, Seoul, South Korea.
Sakina Laksimi-Morrow
TLC Fellow
Sakina Laksimi-Morrow is a Doctoral student in the Urban Education department and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program. Sakina received her BA in Political Science and Communication Arts from the College of New Rochelle, and her MA in Media, Culture and Communications from NYU. Her academic interests have spanned a number of interdisciplinary topics and issues with a social justice perspective. She is interested in charting out historical relationships between social inequality and systems of power and governance, and their mechanisms of reproduction. Sakina has worked as an educator in a number of colleges in New York, gaining experience both in and out the classroom with curriculum development, assessment and pedagogical development. She joined the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center to pursue her research interests on the ways that students of color fit into institutions of education. Her other interests include postcolonial theories, gender and disability issues, documentaries, films, food, and travel.
Inés Vañó García
TLC Fellow
Inés Vañó García is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Linguistics (Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures program) at The Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the professionalization of the teaching of Spanish in the United States during the 20th century, and her approach to sociolinguistics delves into how language representations, linguistic and social practices are inscribed within unequal social hierarchies of power. Inés has been teaching language and linguistics undergraduate and graduate courses at CUNY since 2013; most recently at LaGuardia as a Mellon CUNY Humanities Alliance Graduate Teacher Fellow.
Avra Spector
TLC Fellow
Avra Spector is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature. Her research interests include silence and translation in 20th century literature. She currently teaches at Baruch College and The Cooper Union where she is also the Director of the Summer Writing Program and a Writing Associate in the Center for Writing. She’s also taught at City Tech, Queensborough Community College, Parsons and Holy Names University, California.
John Zayac
TLC Fellow
John Zayac is a Ph.D. candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program. His dissertation research combines field and analytical methods to decipher the triggering mechanisms and eruptive history of highly explosive volcanoes in northwestern Nicaragua. Following the completion of his B.S. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his M.S. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, John worked as community college geology professor in Los Angeles. John has taught lecture, laboratory, and independent project-driven courses at UC Santa Barbara, Los Angeles Pierce College, the Henry Street Settlement, and Queens College. John’s work at the TLC is broadly focused on the development of resources for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) instructors and the expansion of foundational scientific literacy throughout the CUNY student population.
Lindsey Albracht
Summer Peer Mentor
Lindsey Albracht is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in writing studies, multilingual student writing, and faculty development. A former TESOL instructor and teacher educator, she is currently writing her dissertation on community-engaged approaches to translingual faculty development.
As both a Digital Pedagogy Specialist at the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning and as a Teaching and Learning Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, Lindsey assists faculty in designing classrooms which support the integration of technology, writing, and project-based learning in ways that center equity and accessibility. She also works as a Writing Consultant at the Columbia School of Social Work Writing Center, and has taught first-year composition, English as a Second Language, Introduction to Literary Studies, and Public Writing inside and outside of the CUNY system.
Fernanda Blanco Vidal
Summer Peer Mentor
Fernanda Blanco Vidal is a doctoral student from the Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center (CUNY). She is a Critical Latin American Psychologist from Brazil, and her scholarship focuses on social memory, forced displacement, political suffering and the relationship people have with land and water. She is Adjunct Faculty at the Department of Psychology at the City College where she teaches a course of her creation “Psychology of People in Places – From Climate Changes to Gentrification”. At the Teaching Learning Center, she was part of two FIGs (Focused Inquiry Group), one on Water Justice and a second one on Climate Across the Curriculum.
