The Office of Faculty Development (OFD) is pleased to announce the eight faculty members selected to participate in the Scholarly Writing Fellows Program for the 2026-27 academic year. As a Scholarly Writing Fellow (SWF), faculty will partner with OFD to catalyze interdisciplinary support for faculty writing and expand a mutual support community of writers across campus.
For the 2026-27 academic year, OFD expanded the role of SWFs with an increased research stipend. In addition to helping their peer faculty members carve out writing time through their leadership of writing circles, this year’s cohort will offer Write on Sites and Write Where You Ares, and play a key role in offering guidance to help develop OFD’s Scholarly Writing program.
2026-27 Scholarly Writing Fellows:
Debbie Felton is a Professor of Classics; she teaches ancient Greek and Latin as well as various courses in translation, including Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean, Fairy Tales in the Ancient World, Classical Mythology, Herodotus and the Persian Wars, and Medical Terminology. She specializes in folklore in classical literature and has published on various folklore-related topics including ghosts and witches. She is the author of Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021). She has also edited several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021), The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024), and A Cultural History of Monsters in Antiquity (forthcoming, 2027). Her current book project, The Ancient Undead: Ghosts, Revenants, and Other Weird Tales from Greece and Rome, is under contract with Reaktion Books. Since 2015, Professor Felton has been the editor of the interdisciplinary journal Preternature, a venue for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable.
Verónica Martín Ruiz is an Assistant Professor of Marketing; her research focuses on how cultural factors such as honor (stemming from cultural psychology research) affect consumer and employee behaviors in service situations, triggered responses, and potential interventions to redirect behavior. She also conducts research in multicultural marketplace well-being and DEI matters. Her work has been published in top marketing journals and received the 2024 Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Award. Verónica teaches Multicultural Marketing and Consumer Behavior. She holds a PhD in Marketing (minor in Psychology) from the Ivy College of Business at Iowa State University (ISU), an MBA from ISU, an MA in Translation and Localization Management from MIIS, and a BA in Translation and Interpretation from the University of Granada (Spain), where she also engaged in doctoral studies. She spent 12+ years in managerial and consulting roles in the US automotive and financial services industries.
Alice Nash is an Associate Professor of History, she teaches courses on Indigenous and Early American history. She has published numerous articles on northeastern Native American history, including “1759, not 1776: Odanak in the Revolutionary Era” for Historic Deerfield Magazine (Summer 2026) and three articles on Wabanaki history in Recherches amérindiennes au Québec. She is a co-editor with Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, Michael Stewart Foley, Stefan Rinke and Mario Rufer of The Routledge Handbook on the History and Society of the Americas: Inter-American Perspectives (2019). The volume includes her essay, “Indigenous Peoples (Beginnings to 1900).” She is the recipient of four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019) to serve as director or co-director (with Linda Coombs) of Teaching Native American Histories, a Summer Institute for K-12 teachers drawn from a national pool of applicants. She held the first Fulbright-Université de Montréal Visiting Chair (History) in 2003-2004. She currently serves on advisory boards for the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, Historic Deerfield, and the Mellon Initiative in Democracy and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.
Kerry O’Grady is a Senior Lecturer of Business Communication; a faculty affairs expert, sought-after pedagogical innovation consultant, award-winning curriculum developer and professor, and seasoned communications practitioner. Her present teaching appointments include courses in marketing, communications, and management at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fordham University, and Holy Family University. Recent past positions include director of teaching excellence at Columbia Business School and faculty director and associate professor of practice for the master's in Public Relations and Corporate Communications program at Georgetown University. Prior to Georgetown, she spent eight years at NYU, leading and teaching in its M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program. A fearless author on systemic issues in higher education, she's authored pieces for Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. With professional experience in public relations, integrated marketing and advertising, past corporate positions include Associate Director, Integrated Marketing for Women's Health magazine, Senior Manager, Integrated Marketing at Parents, FamilyFun, and American Baby magazines (Meredith Corp.), Business Development Manager, La Voz and TV y Mas, and Advertising Executive, The Arizona Republic (Gannett, Inc.). She's also held consulting roles at Saatchi & Saatchi, Viacom, and TalkSpace. She is a regular pundit and media source, as seen in The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Telegraph, and on ABC News’ digital podcast “Uncomfortable”. She’s been honored with many awards, including President's Club (Gannett, Inc.), Marketing Campaign of the Year Finalist (Meredith Corp.), the Public Relations Society of America - NY top "35 Under 35" winner, and NYU's "Outstanding Service" award.
Emiliano Ricciardi is an Associate Professor of Music History. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, which he completed in 2013 with the support of an ACLS/Mellon fellowship, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. In 2015, he was a Lauro de Bosis postdoctoral fellow in the history of Italian civilization at Harvard University. His main research area is the late Italian madrigal, with an emphasis on the settings of Torquato Tasso’s poetry. He is the director and general editor of the Tasso in Music Project (tassomusic.org), a digital critical edition of the musical settings of Tasso’s poetry, which has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities with a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant (2016-19) and a Digital Advancement Grant (2022-25).
Bianki Torres is a Lecturer in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. His scholarly work focuses on African American popular music culture with interests in gender and sexuality.
Aida Villanueva is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department and a proud Scholarly Writing Fellow. Her research investigates women’s employment, family, and the reproduction of gendered inequalities in Latin America and the United States, with an emphasis on women and families in contexts of disadvantage. Her current portfolio is organized under three branches: (1) the intersection of motherhood, the structure of work, and work trajectories; (2) household composition and women’s employment; (3) children’s family labor.
Qian Zhao is an Assistant Professor in Statistics whose research focuses on statistical methods for analyzing genetic and flow cytometry data. She is committed to applying statistics and data science for meaningful social impacts. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, reading and exploring classical and jazz music.
All faculty and librarians can sign up for a fall Writing Circle led by a Scholarly Writing Fellow through Friday, September 4! Sign up through the Qualtrics form.