Writing Fellows Program

The Writing Fellows Program supports the teaching of writing across the curriculum, with a focus on integrating reading and writing pedagogy into discipline-specific classwork and assignments. Writing Fellows:

  • Lead in-class workshops on topics related to reading, writing, and speaking.
  • Provide support for writing-related classroom activities led by faculty members.
  • Consult with faculty members, at their request, on writing and speaking aims, assignments, progressions and process work, and other pedagogical strategies (for both in-person and online teaching).
  • Are available by request to consult on assessment, including how/what to mark, focusing feedback, and working with English-language learners and students with learning differences. Writing Fellows will not, however, grade papers or otherwise serve as teaching assistants.

Our Writing Fellows

Architecture
Neena Verma (neena.verma@cooper.edu) is an architect, teacher, and theorist. Her office pursues small-scale, forward-thinking projects. Neena's current research and writing focus on the intersection of architectural practice with society; she aims to challenge norms of perception and beauty. Neena has published in Architectural Research Quarterly and is currently working on a book about immigrants finding place. Her collaborative design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale. A former attorney, she has experience in complex civil litigation and real estate transactional law.

Art
Liza St. James (liza.StJames@cooper.edu) earned her BA in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in Tin HouseThe CollagistBOMBThe BelieverThe Paris Review Daily, and other publications. She is editor-at-large for Transit Books and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON.

Engineering
Karen Holmberg (karen.holmberg@cooper.edu) is an archaeologist and volcanologist who looks at radical climate changes of the past to determine what they can or cannot tell us about our environmental present and future. She holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Virginia. Her research has been funded by Fulbright, Mellon, Wenner-Gren, National Geographic, and Make Our Planet Great Again awards. She has taught at Brown and Stanford Universities.  In addition to serving as the Engineering Writing Fellow at Cooper Union, she is a Research Scientist at NYU, Director of the NYU-Gallatin WetLab, and member of the *This is Not a Drill* working group on technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice through the Future Imagination Fund at NYU-Tisch. She is deeply interested in how creative outreach of science and engineering insights can contribute to more sustainable and equitable societies.

Humanities and Social Sciences
Marie Hubbard (marie.hubbard@cooper.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University. She studies and writes about the history of anglophone literature in British colonial settings, as well as U.S. involvement in Third World literary production during the Cold War. She has several years’ experience as a writing instructor and consultant at the high school and undergraduate level. In addition to her role as a writing associate at Cooper Union, Marie is currently an instructor of first-year academic writing in the General Studies program at Columbia University.

Contact Us

For general information about the program, or to request support from a writing fellow, contact:
Kit Nicholls
Director of the Center for Writing and Learning
kit.nicholls@cooper.edu

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.