The Teaching and Learning Center is delighted to announce that Dr. Elizabeth Alsop will be joining us as the Mellon Humanities Scholar, starting this fall. In her new role, Dr. Alsop will help pivot the lessons of the Mellon-funded Humanities Alliance with LaGuardia Community College to a broader constituency by extending the programming, partnerships, and reach of the Teaching and Learning Center.

Dr. Alsop received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center, where she also earned a certificate in Film Studies. As a doctoral student at CUNY, she taught literature and film at Queens College and Hunter College; worked in the Writing Across the Curriculum program at York College; and served as an Instructional Technology Fellow at City Tech. Prior to joining the GC’s Teaching and Learning Center, Elizabeth was an Assistant Professor of English and Film at Western Kentucky University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses in 20th-century British literature, world literature, composition, and film history and theory.

Her current book project, Making Conversation: The Poetics of Talk in Modernist Fiction, examines the evolving function of dialogue in the Anglo-American modernist novel. She is also planning a second project that explores the impact of cinematic aesthetics on contemporary television. In addition to her academic work, Elizabeth writes about film, TV, and popular culture for general audiences, and has previously published essays on these topics in publications including The Atlantic, The LA Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine.

Funded by a $3.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Alliance will broaden doctoral student training and improve humanities education for approximately 2,500 undergraduates at LaGuardia Community College. Beginning in Fall 2016, this ambitious new partnership will train Ph.D. students in innovative methods to teach humanities to a predominantly immigrant, low-income, urban, undergraduate community. The goal of the alliance is to support graduate students in mastering the most successful methods for teaching undergraduate general education humanities courses to increasingly diverse students while simultaneously broadening and strengthening access to and opportunity in the humanities for those undergraduates.

The Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center is entering its second year. The TLC supports Graduate Center students who are beginning and evolving as college teachers, and develops programming that asserts and explores the centrality of pedagogy to the modern university. TLC staff provide individual consultations and workshops for students on course and assignment design, syllabus construction, classroom management, educational technology, assessment, preparing for the job market, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. The TLC also partners with sister units on special projects at the Graduate Center and across CUNY. Members of the CUNY community can stay abreast of the TLC’s activities by joining its group on the CUNY Academic Commons, located at https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/.

Please join us in welcoming Elizabeth Alsop back to the Graduate Center in her new position at the Teaching and Learning Center!