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 founding 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 member of the doctoral faculty and teaches in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program and MA Program in Digital Humanities, and directs the CUNY Humanities Alliance. He 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.

Marwa Answar
Program Coordinator

Marwa Answar is the Program Coordinator for the Teaching and Learning Center and Interactive Technology Pedagogy program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She supports the program’s mission of fostering inclusive and creative learning environments. She previously worked for LaGuardia Community College, for the Center For Teaching and Learning as an ePortfolio consultant, where she helped educators and students with integrating technology into their teaching and learning, promoting innovative pedagogical practices. She graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in Human Biology. Outside of work, Marwa enjoys traveling and learning about different cultures.

Luis Henao Uribe
Humanities Director

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.

Şule Aksoy
Research Associate/Post-Doctoral Fellow

Manju Adikesavan
TLC Fellow 

Manju is an architect, and urban planner, currently a doctoral candidate in Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Manju’s dissertation focuses on people-place relationships and group dynamics in remote and hybrid/blended work and learning environments. Manju’s research on workspace equity in hybrid/blended university campuses is published in the Journal of Corporate Real Estate and Inside Higher Ed. As a TLC Fellow, Manju will research and share hybrid/blended teaching and learning practices for improving connectedness, access, and inclusivity in and out of the classroom.

Oriana Mejías Martínez

WAC at-large Fellow

Oriana is a PhD Candidate for the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. For the past two years, she was part of CUNY Humanities Alliance Fellowship specifically with the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program at LaGuardia Community College, serving as a liaison between LaGuardia CC Faculty and their partners in Latin American universities. She has taught Spanish language and culture courses (L2 and HL) at Hunter College, CUNY and Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. Previously, she was a tutor in The Modern Language Center at John Jay College for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and also was a recipient of Transformative Learning in the Humanities Faculty Fellows. Her approach to teaching is based on collaboration, and critical pedagogy tools that fosters knowledge creation among students according to their interests, backgrounds, and prospective careers. 

Angela LaScala-Gruenewald
Digital Projects Fellow

Angela LaScala-Gruenewald is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center. They study penal institutions, political economies, and racism, examining how organizations reproduce or challenge social inequalities. They have taught classes in social theory, criminology, and law and society at CUNY and SUNY campuses. Through these experiences, they have come to think of teaching as organizing. Building trust and power alongside students is essential for learning. They view the digital world as one possible space for students to develop, share, and even own the products of their learning, and explore the triumphs and challenges of knowledge creation. They are excited to develop TLC’s digital projects in 2024-2025. Prior to their doctoral work, Angela worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and Arnold Ventures. Angela received their B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

Zach Muhlbauer
TLC Fellow

Zach Muhlbauer is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research explores knowledge infrastructures of literacy and learning within the contemporary university, with a focus on platform politics and how educational technologies circumscribe literacy practices in and out of the classroom. Previously, he served as a digital pedagogy consultant in support of online writing courses at SUNY Geneseo. Since joining the CUNY Graduate Center, he has worked on digital projects that range from the CUNY Distance Learning Archive to the Discord Educational Toolkit. Currently, he teaches first-year writing courses at Baruch College, serves on the Editorial Collective of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and acts as the Co-Coordinator for OpenCUNY, an open-source WordPress network run by and for GC students. His approach to teaching combines critical and social theories of learning with digital humanities pedagogy to foster community, collaboration, and reflective practice in his classes.

Jennifer Queenan
TLC Fellow

Jenna (Jennifer) Queenan (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She began her teaching career as an ENL teacher in 2013 at a public high school in Brooklyn and has since taught education courses at Queens, Barnard, and Hunter Colleges and worked at Hostos Community College as a Humanities Alliance fellow. Her research focuses on teacher activism and organizing in social movements, with a specific focus on the work of the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE), where she is a member. Through NYCoRE and other education spaces in New York City, Jenna has experience coaching and facilitating critical professional development for/with educators on topics such as abolitionist pedagogies, supporting and advocating with multilingual learners and undocumented youth, antiracist pedagogies, competency-based grading, and more.

Kristi Riley
TLC Fellow

Kristi Riley is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her studies focus on critical criminology, feminist theory, and popular culture. Her dissertation, currently titled “Breaking Glass, Making Prison: How carceral feminism shapes the prison nation” examines society’s political, economic, and cultural investments in carcerality in ways that are antithetical to feminist politics. She holds B.A.s in psychology and community studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a Master’s of Science in conflict resolution from the University of Oregon Law School, and a Master’s of Philosophy in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Since joining the GC, she’s held fellowships with Humanities New York and the GC’s Center for the Humanities. Prior to becoming a Fellow with TLC, Kristi spent a decade working in criminal legal services, policy, research, and system reform.  She’s taught sociology and criminal justice courses at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College, Baruch College, and Hunter College.

Varnica Arora
Open Teaching Fellow

Varnica Arora is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical psychology, culture, and suicide. Her dissertation deploys an intersectional and cultural lens to understand youth experiences in the aftermath of suicidal behaviors in rural India, particularly the importance of a fear of social death. Varnica has taught courses in Social Psychology at City College of New York and Macalester College. Currently, she is teaching a new course that she has designed on Psychology and Social Media. Before embarking on her PhD journey, Varnica worked as a community organizer with women’s collectives in central India.

Jeff Voss
TLC Fellow

Jeff Voss is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught English composition at Brooklyn College and tutored as a WAC Fellow at Kingsborough Community College. He’s writing a dissertation focusing on the performances of Adrian Piper and Richard Pryor in the wake of the brutal suppression of 1960s black liberation struggles. Through Piper and Pryor his project attempts to trace how comedy and humor produce and disrupt gender relations, racialization, and bodily sensations by disarticulating the relationship between common sense and sense/s of humor. He approaches teaching with the sense that amidst the brutal and insufficient conditions of the University, the potential for radical alternatives always exists. The relationship between a student and a text can create openings to sense and enact these alternatives, especially if students are given the time, resources, and support to sit together in the struggle and joy that is reading.

Jessie Stein

Open Teaching Fellow

Jessie Stein is a migration geographer whose work focuses on cultural politics, social reproduction, and bordering.  Her doctoral work engages with the cultural politics of migration in Quebec, migrant justice movements, ‘essential’ labor, and the formation of nationalisms.  A long-time musician, past studies have looked at the role of participatory art spaces in broader social and political movements and the democratic potential of intercultural music space in the context of the so-called European refugee crisis.

Brooke Thomas

TLC Editorial Fellow

Brooke Thomas is a PhD candidate and medievalist working in the English department. She also teaches composition and literature at Baruch College. She currently researches the intersection of Play Theory, Game Studies, and medieval romance and is working on her dissertation.

Janelle Poe

TLC Fellow

Janelle Poe is a PhD student in the English department at the CUNY Graduate Center, with research focuses on African Diaspora, Film and Media studies, and teaching experience in English composition, creative writing, and Black studies at City College and Lehman College. A current Open Educational Resources fellow at City College (CUNY) and former Humanities Alliance Fellow placed at the Borough of Manhattan Community College where she focused on the Black Studies Across The Americas project, she believes in the global right to free, high-quality education, learning and living communities where equity, diversity, freedom, and love are universal. International Studies B.A. (UNC-Chapel Hill) and MFA in Creative Writing (CUNY-City College), a multidisciplinary artist and lifetime music lover, she loves singing, writing, record shopping, dancing, and making stuff by hand.

Former Staff Members

Cristine Khan

Chandni Tariq

Ana Flavia Badue

Pedro Cabello del Moral

Elizabeth Alsop

Molly Bauer

Claire Cahen

Mei Ling Chua

Agustina Checa

Atasi Das

Elizabeth Decker

Lucia Dikaczova

Ryan Donovan

Lais Duarte

Miranda Fedock

Talisa Feliciano

Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Inés Vaño Garcia

Anke Geertsma

Shima Houshyar

Kyueun Kim

Sakina Laksimi

Sarah Litvin

Andrew McKinney

Kaitlin Mondello

Louis Olander

Cristina Pardo Porto

Avra Spector

Chy Sprauve

Katie Uva

Fernanda Blanco-Vidal

John Zayac

Anna Zeemont

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