Teaching Academy 2022 Presenters
We are so excited to introduce you to the presenters for the 2022 Teaching Academy!
Cierra Abellera (she/her)
Cierra Abellera is a fourth-year Ph.D. in the Psychology of Peace & Violence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Cierra is interested in how belonging is shaped by the intergroup contact experiences of groups that hold different societal statuses. She specializes in the contact and belonging processes among host society members and newcomers and how belonging and contact processes relate to perceptions of social injustice and collective action and was recently awarded the 2022 Applied Social Issues Internship Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues for a national research study in collaboration with the Hello Neighbor Network.
Cierra's Workshop "Addressing Microaggressions in the Classroom"
Fatih Cetin (he/him)
Fatih Cetin is an international Ph.D. student of Political Science. He taught various courses on Introduction to American Politics, Introduction to Comparative Politics, Environmental Injustices and Climate Change, and Race and American Politics. He specializes on comparative politics with a special focus on democratization and race relations in the United States and Western Europe.
Fatih's Workshop "Inviting Student Identities and Experiences into the Classroom"
Tiarra Cooper (she/her)
Tiarra Cooper is a PhD candidate in German and Scandinavian studies and expects to complete her doctorate degree next year. She earned a master’s degree and graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from UMass and her BA from Smith College. She is a former Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and was nominated for the Distinguished Teaching Award at UMass. Her research has been supported by the UMass Graduate School, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Yiddish Book Center, and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
Tiarra currently teaches in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, though German Studies is still her home. In addition to her dissertation–which looks to women’s experiences of forcible sterilization under the Nazi regime–she takes great interest in making higher education more accessible via Universal Design, feminist pedagogy, and anti-racist pedagogy. In her spare time, Tiarra enjoys knitting, reckless napping, watching documentaries, playing with her spawn, and walking her lab with her partner.
Tiarra's Workshop "Teaching Emotional or Controversial Topics"
Sam Davis (he/him)
Sam Davis is a trans critical theorist, literary scholar, filmmaker, and musician. His research is at the intersection of Trans studies, Black studies, and Disability studies, with a focus on the relationship between social abjection and prosthesis. His auto-ethnographic documentary thesis, In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith (2017) has received various awards, including the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize at Smith College, as well as being the Feature Film at GLAAD’s Spring Film Festival in 2018. Sam is currently a doctoral candidate at UMass in the English department. He received his MA from Columbia University in 2020 and his BA from Smith College in 2017.
Sam's Workshop "Setting and Holding Boundaries in Our Classrooms"
Jeremy Levine (he/him)
Jeremy Levine is a PhD Candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program, housed in English. His research focuses on the effects of secondary school writing standards on how students write in college. His chapter on grading was published in Volume 4 of Writing Spaces, an open-access textbook for college writing courses, and he has led workshops for Junior Year Writing faculty at UMass Amherst on the same topic.
Jeremy's Workshop "How to Grade Writing Without Completely Alienating Your Students"
Rik Sengupta (he/him)
Rik Sengupta is an international PhD candidate in CICS. He has taught several courses, both undergraduate and graduate level, for the department, and received the Outstanding Teaching Award from CICS in 2019. His work focuses on complexity theory, graph algorithms, and fairness constraints.
Rik's Workshop "Teaching an Unpopular Class"
Cielo Sharkus (she/her)
Cielo is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research investigates the hazardous impacts of anthropogenic climate change on human health and safety by exploring the impacts of flooding on drinking water quality, pollutant movement, and solute transport. Her work focuses on understanding how historically and systemically marginalized groups disproportionately experience environmental disasters and how to engineer physical and social resilience to these phenomena. Cielo is also the founder of H.O.P.E. (Humans for the opposition of pollution and emissions) a non-profit dedicated to participatory learning and community engagement centered around hazard mitigation and environmental remediation in the Northeast.
Cielo's Workshop "Emotional Intelligence and Empathetic Teaching as Tools for Inclusive Classroom Engagement"
Brian Wermcrantz (he/him)
Brian is a PhD candidate in the philosophy department at UMass Amherst. After undergrad, he taught English as a foreign language in South Korea with the Fulbright Program, and since then he’s been teaching philosophy as a TA and instructor at Brandeis and now at UMass Amherst.