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 MA Program in Digital Humanities, and directs the CUNY Humanities Alliance. 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.
Lucia Dikaczova
Program Coordinator
Cristine Khan
Program Coordinator
Cristine Khan is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. She is interested in studying and researching the intersections of immigration, critical race theory, and education. Her current research centers on race and identity formation in the Indo-Caribbean community. Prior to beginning her program, Cristine worked at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs helping to create and implement educational programs for immigrant adult ESOL learners. She has taught and researched 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, bike, explore the diversity of her hometown Queens, and spend time with her two cats.
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.
Laurie Hurson
Assistant Director of Open Education
Laurie Hurson is the Assistant Director of Open Education in the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center. In this role she supports faculty with integrating open pedagogical practices into their teaching and leads faculty development seminars on teaching with open educational resources and ethical uses of educational technology. She also provides support for teaching with CUNY’s WordPress installation, The CUNY Academic Commons. She has a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the Graduate Center; her research explores undergraduate students’ learning ecologies and how these resource networks shape student learning. She has taught courses across CUNY since 2013; currently she teaches professional development graduate seminars at the Graduate Center and psychology courses at John Jay College.
Şule Aksoy
Research Associate/Post-Doctoral Fellow
Molly Bauer
TLC Fellow
Fernanda Blanco-Vidal
TLC Fellow
Fernanda Blanco Vidal is a doctoral student in Environmental Psychology. Her research focuses on narrative and social memory, critical psychology, forced migration, and people-place relationships. She has a long experience as an instructor in Brazil and as an Adjunct Faculty City College of New York where she developed a course of her creation “Psychology of People in Places – From Climate Changes to Gentrification. As an educator, she focuses on interdisciplinary exchanges, liberation pedagogy, and student-centered approaches. She published a book called “Longing yes, Sadness no – Social Memory, Psychology and Forced Displacement” focusing on people displaced by a dam. In this picture, she is holding one of her two beloved cats (Frida and Zeferina) who passed last year but will live in her heart forever. Now, she is loving her new beloved cat, Amora, who is a playful biter cat. She loves water – sea, lakes, rivers, rain. Lately, she is really missing her colorful city, Salvador (Bahia), where the ocean and sky are blue and warm.
Pedro Cabello del Moral 
TLC Fellow
Pedro Cabello del Moral is a doctoral student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures department at CUNY. He researches recent Spanish and Latin American film and media from a decolonial perspective. His recent publications feature, among other topics, Central American cinema and human rights, and contemporary Spanish documentaries in the post-crisis scenario. Before joining the Teaching and Learning Center, Pedro taught courses on Spanish language and Spanish and Latin American film in Hunter College and Brooklyn College. He is interested in decolonial and abolitionist pedagogies, media literacies within the classroom, and open educational resources. Pedro combines his work at the university with his career as a filmmaker, continuously searching for new ways to transform cinematic conventions and to rethink the hierarchical structures that typically define film workspaces. His work has tackled issues related to migrant youth in the Spanish education system and historical memory after Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Other more recent nonfiction projects include portrayals of migrant justice, mutual aid, and food justice movements throughout New York City.
Ana Flavia Badue
TLC Fellow 
Ana Flavia Badue is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her research focuses on startups that develop digital technologies applied to industrial agriculture in Brazil, and she asks to what extent these technologies promote new iterations of extractivism and economic dependency. As a teacher, Ana has taught several interdisciplinary courses at a community college in Brazil. In New York City, she has taught anthropology courses at Baruch College. Student-centered approaches, feminist and liberation pedagogies have informed her teaching over the years.
Shima Houshyar
TLC Fellow
Shima Houshyar is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center. Their research examines the politics of infrastructure in Iran and technonatural transformations of Iranian national modernity during the Cold War. Shima has been teaching cultural anthropology at Hunter College since 2016 and was previously a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Fellow at BMCC. They are interested in student-centered pedagogy, the use of open-source digital tools in the classroom, and applying principles of universal design for teaching.
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.
Chandni Tariq 
TLC Fellow
I am a Ph.D. student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am broadly interested in understanding the construction of alterity and racial categories across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. My research examines the cultural materials of slavery and empire and their lasting legacy of anti-Blackness in the United States, Britain, and South Asia. My dissertation seeks to illustrate the connections between an Atlantic world and an Indian Ocean world that were entrenched in similar discourses over slavery, unfreedom, anti-slavery, race/racism, and empire/colonialism.I have taught U.S. History and World History courses across CUNY. My pedagogical approach emerges from my personal experiences as a student of color growing up in NYC. My emphasis has always been on using reading and writing together to give my students a language to express and advocate for their historical perspectives in an academic setting. I have spent my time teaching interrogating my own grading practices and have adapted them to meet the wide range of capabilities students bring to the classroom. Teaching and learning ought to be socially conscious and restorative for both educators and students. Outside of the classroom and dissertating, I love grocery shopping, cooking, and experimenting with food.
Former Staff Members
Elizabeth Alsop
Claire Cahen
Mei Ling Chua
Agustina Checa
Atasi Das
Elizabeth Decker
Ryan Donovan
Lais Duarte
Miranda Fedock
Talisa Feliciano
Asilia Franklin-Phipps
Inés Vaño Garcia
Anke Geertsma
Kyueun Kim
Sakina Laksimi
Sarah Litvin
Andrew McKinney
Kaitlin Mondello
Louis Olander
Cristina Pardo Porto
Avra Spector
Chy Sprauve
Katie Uva
John Zayac
Anna Zeemont
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
