Director of Writing in the Disciplines / Assistant Professor
Jono Mischkot has been teaching in NYU’s Expository Writing Program for 12+ years. He earned his BA in English from San Francisco University, his MA in Literature from San Francisco State University and his MFA in Fiction from NYU. Before becoming the Director of Writing in the Disciplines, he was the Assistant Director of the Writing Center where he developed the Remote Writing Center for Global Scholars and the Writing Partners Program, which pairs Peer Tutors with Multilingual students who are struggling to meet the demands of college writing. Jono also served as the Assistant Director at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering where he oversaw the integration of first-year writing courses into the existing STEM curriculum. Currently, Jono is developing and piloting a new Writing Lab for Tandon’s Mechanical Engineering Department as well as conducting an IRB-approved study on how students unconsciously engage in and respond to cultural insensitivity in their own and their peers’ writing.
Consultants
Natalia Andrievskikh holds an MA in English and PhD in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton. As a Russian-American, she is interested in cross-cultural negotiations of identity and loves working with international students. Natalia’s research interests include Visual and Material Rhetoric, Digital Writing, and Media and Culture Studies. She is a co-author of The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste (Parlor Press). In her creative work she explores the role of myth-making in construction and preservation of memory.
Joe Califf received a B.Sc. in Evolutionary Anthropology from Rutgers University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from New York University. His academic research and interests range from behavioral endocrinology and human evolution to science education and pedagogy. He has also taught and conducted research at Princeton University, the American Museum of Natural History, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, Montclair State University, and Hunter College
Noelle Mole Liston: A former Fulbright scholar, Liston is a cultural anthropologist whose work lives at the intersection of politics and capitalism, medicine and science, and epistemology: How does what we know about the world shape who we think should rule it? Her first book, Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy, received the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award in 2013. Her second book, The Truth Society: Science, Disinformation and Politics in Berlusconi’s Italy offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation. Liston is serving her second term as a senator in the Contract Faculty Senators Council. She also teaches workshops on proposal writing and research in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Alessia Palanti: A native of Florence, Italy, Palanti is a Clinical Assistant Professor in NYU’s Expository Writing Program. She holds a PhD from Columbia University where she has been a full time writing instructor for almost six years. Her published work includes “We Want Lesbians Too: A Lesbian Feminist Counter-History Inspired by We Want Roses Too,” which appears in the anthology Queering Italian Media. She currently also teaches writing with NYU’s Prison Education Program, and she has taught incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students in Columbia’s Justice in Education initiative. She is currently working on a video project interviewing formerly incarcerated students about their experiences taking writing courses inside the prison. Alessia has taught for college prep programs based in China and has become passionate about studying Mandarin and Chinese culture. She is interested in writing pedagogy for international student populations and for students with a history of incarceration. Outside academia, Alessia is a dance performer and choreographer.
Zach Udko is a senior lecturer at NYU, where he teaches writing courses at Tisch School of the Arts. Through the Writing-in-the-Disciplines initiative, he enjoys actively collaborating with professors, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from the College of Arts and Science. Over the past 15 years, he has worked with the departments of Psychology, History, Medieval Studies, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Italian Studies, the CORE Curriculum; and French Literature, Thought, and Culture. Zach studied at Stanford University (BA and MA, English) and New York University (MFA, Dramatic Writing; MA, Applied Psychology). A recipient of the Dramatists Guild Fellowship, he has written and directed shows in New York and the United Kingdom, and has contributed to Condé Nast Traveler, Christie’s, Backstage West, British Airways’ High Life Magazine, Mandarin Oriental Magazine, uInterview, and The Huffington Post. Zach is the Coordinator of the NYU College Writing Workshops and the Faculty Affiliate for the Laughing Matters Comedy Explorations Community in Weinstein Hall. He is also a psychotherapist in Manhattan, where he specializes in working with artists, anxiety disorders, and LGBTQ populations.
Natasha Zaretsky, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in the Expository Writing Program and a cultural anthropologist, focusing on human rights, migration, and the politics of memory and truth in the Americas. A former Fulbright scholar, she received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Princeton University. Her first book (with A. Levine) was Landscapes of Memory and Impunity (Brill 2015) and her articles have appeared in The Tablet, Global Americans, and Foreign Affairs. She also leads the Truth in the Americas project for Rutgers University’s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, where she is a Visiting Scholar. Current projects include documentaries about Cuba and Argentina, and a book about memory and transitional justice in Argentina. At NYU, she teaches writing and coordinates the Senior Honors Thesis Writing Group program, facilitating writing groups and thesis-related workshops for various departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, including Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Environmental Studies, History, Politics, Psychology, and Social and Cultural Analysis.