The College of Arts and Humanities welcomes new faculty members joining the college this fall!<\/p>\n
Jason D. Gregory ’19, Lecturer Rochelle Hurt, Assistant Professor \u2013 Creative Writing (Poetry) Stephen Hopkins, Assistant Professor – Early Medieval Languages and Literatures Sara Raffel, Assistant Professor – Technical Communication Sarah Singer, Assistant Professor – Technical Communication Tadashi Ishikawa, Assistant Professor Haidar Khezri, Assistant Professor Taoues Hadour, Assistant Professor Deborah Horzen, Lecturer<\/strong><\/p>\n Aimee Schoonmaker, Lecturer<\/strong><\/p>\n Esmeralda Duarte, Lecturer<\/strong><\/p>\n Daniel Cox, Instructor – Digital Media<\/strong><\/p>\n Hezekiah Olopade, Assistant in Art – FIEA<\/strong><\/p>\n Milos Ajdinovic, Lecturer – Film Nicholas Twardus, Lecturer – Film Production & Film Studies Devin Monnens, Lecturer – Digital Media Matin Salemirad, Instructor – Digital Media<\/strong><\/p>\n Alyssa Lutz, Instructor – FIEA<\/strong><\/p>\n Stacey DiLiberto ’03 ’11Ph.D., Lecturer Vivian Majkowski, Associate Professor – Voice, Speech and Acting Robert Siler, Assistant Professor – Lighting Design Chlo\u00eb Rae\u00a0Edmonson, Assistant Professor – Theatre History
\n<\/strong>Jason D. Gregory is a recent film production MFA graduate from UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media (Go Knights!). He received his undergraduate degree in film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002 and during his studies, Gregory was selected, twice, as a participant in the Zora Neale Hurston\/Richard Wright Writer\u2019s Workshop. \u00a0In 2010, Gregory founded his own Telly-award-winning, multicultural advertising agency, Gregory Media Group, LLC. He decided to pursue his childhood dream in 2016 and enrolled in the MFA film production program where he immediately began writing his thesis project, Waking Up White<\/em>.\u00a0 Filmed as a television pilot, Waking Up White<\/em> is the story of a Black family that wakes up White and has 30 days to determine if they\u2019d rather return to their cultural roots or stick with the \u201cnew skin\u201d they\u2019re in. Since its development, the pilot script for has been selected as a 2018 Quarterfinalist in ScreenCraft\u2019s Film Fund<\/em> and Pilot Launch TV Script<\/em> competitions and a 2018 Semifinalist in the WeScreenplay Television<\/em> Competition<\/em>. The television pilot has recently been submitted to various local, national and international film festivals, while also garnering local and regional media coverage. \u00a0And because of his commitment to nurturing and mentoring the next generation of filmmakers, Gregory was recently appointed as the president of the Orlando Urban Film Festival; a festival dedicated to promoting and supporting minority films and filmmakers.\u00a0Gregory was the recipient of the 2019 College of Arts and Humanities Graduate Student Teaching Award and the inaugural <\/em>Nicholson School of Communication and Media\u2019s Outstanding Teaching Graduate Programs Award. He was nominated for his commitment to teaching his students to \u201cfail their way to success\u201d and is honored to have received both awards. In 2019, Gregory completed another childhood dream and joined UCF\u2019s English department as a screenwriting lecturer. In this position, he will continue to mold, mentor and challenge his students to find their voice through the art of screenwriting.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Rochelle Hurt holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of two books of poetry:\u00a0The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems, <\/em>and\u00a0In\u00a0Which I Play the Runaway,\u00a0<\/em>which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize in 2016. She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from\u00a0Arts & Letters, <\/em>Poetry International,\u00a0Vermont Studio Center, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and the Yaddo Foundation.\u00a0She publishes poetry and creative nonfiction widely in literary journals, and she is the founding editor of\u00a0The Bind,\u00a0<\/em>a poetry review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Dr. Stephen Hopkins specializes in the languages and literatures of the early medieval North Sea (Old English, Old Norse, Welsh, and Irish). His current book project, The Infernal Laboratory: Hell and Apocryphal Hermeneutics in the Medieval North Sea<\/em>, traces the history of hell in vernacular religious texts (ca. 700-1300), finding that apocrypha (non-canonical scriptures) about hell were exceptionally productive spaces for experiments with localized theology and identity across the Middle Ages. He comes to UCF from Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned his Ph.D. in English Literature in June 2019. His work has been recognized internationally, with generous fellowship support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Scandinavian Foundation. At UCF he is very much looking forward to teaching medieval literature courses as well as linguistics. Follow him on Twitter for a steady stream of bad linguistic and literary memes (@phil_lol_ogist<\/a>).<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Sara Raffel holds a Ph.D. in Texts and Technology from UCF, an M.Phil. in Film Theory and History\u00a0from Trinity College of\u00a0the University of Dublin, Ireland, and a B.A. in Media Studies from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses\u00a0on interactivity and playable stories. Her recent work with narrative transportation theory examines\u00a0how virtual reality stories can impact players\u2019 feelings toward social justice issues, and her study the visual novel genre explores the intersection of fiction and gamer interaction. As\u00a0part of her\u00a0dedication to the study of social\u00a0justice, technology, and community history, Raffel serves as director of oral histories on the LGBTQ\u00a0History Museum of Central Florida\u2019s\u00a0board of\u00a0directors. She has recently published in journals\u00a0such as\u00a0Visual\u00a0Ethnography<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The\u00a0Public Historian<\/em>, and has presented her\u00a0work at a wide array of national and international conferences, including iDMAa, IEEE ProComm<\/em>\u00a0and Meaningful Play<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Dr. Sarah Singer received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on digital rhetorics of health and medicine, genre theory and transformation, and technical writing pedagogy. Her current project, The Empowerment Paradox: Rhetorics of Lyme Disease and the Future of Chronic Illness<\/em>, examines arguments about contested health conditions and explores how patients are forced to navigate the digital deluge of online health information. Sarah’s work appears in Technical Communication Quarterly<\/em>, Peitho<\/em>, and Journal of Medical Humanities<\/em>.<\/p>\nHistory<\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Tadashi Ishikawa is an assistant professor of history at UCF. His research and teaching interests include modern Japan and East Asia, gender and sexuality, empire and colonialism, and law and society. Before joining the faculty at UCF, Ishikawa has received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Chiu Program for Taiwan Studies at Oregon State University and taught in the Asian and Asian American Studies and History departments at Binghamton University. While born and raised in Japan, he has received a Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago; and a M.A. degree in East Asian Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Entitled \u201cGeographies of Gender: Family and Law in the Japanese Empire,\u201d his current book project explores the Japanese empire\u2013including interwar Japan and colonial Taiwan\u2013with a focus on gender in the interplay of family and law before the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific War in 1937.<\/p>\nModern Languages and Literatures<\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Dr. Haidar Khezri received his B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Razi University in Kermanshah, Iran, and his M.A. in Comparative Literature (Arabic and Persian) from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. He earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature from Damascus University, Syria, in 2011. In addition, he is a certified OPI Tester of Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish languages for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Prior to UCF, Khezri was a Graduate Assistant at Tarbiat Modarres University in Iran (2004-2006), a lecturer at Damascus University in Syria (2008-2011), an Assistant Professor at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey (2011-2014), and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University – Bloomington (IUB) (2014-2018). At IUB, Khezri designed and developed the first and only Sorani Kurdish curriculum for North American universities under the Title VI – U.S. Department of Education Grant, and through IUB\u2019s Center for the Study of the Middle East. Khezri was a Visiting Faculty Member and Resident Senior Fellow at UCF\u2019s Department of Political Science through the academic year 2018 \u2013 2019. His first book, Comparative Literature in Iran and the Arab World 1903 \u2013 2012<\/em> (Tehran: Samt Press 2013), was selected as one of the two best Arabic books of 2017 in Iran and was re-published in a second edition by Cairo\u2019s Egyptian Cultural Academy in 2017. Khezri\u2019s book-length translation of poetry includes It Is Only Sound that Remains<\/em> (Erbil: Salahaddin University Press 2016). He is currently co-editing The Walter De Gruyter Companion to Kurdish Literature<\/em> (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Press 2021). His recent work, Sorani Kurdish: An Elementary Textbook<\/em>, is currently under design at IUB\u2019s Center for the Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR), for publication by Georgetown University Press in 2021. His current monograph project deals with the reception of Franz Kafka by Middle Eastern literary circles, particularly after the Arab Spring and the Iranian Green Movement. Khezri has taught advanced courses in Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish languages, Middle Eastern literature and culture (including Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish), comparative literature and cultural studies, and Middle Eastern cinema. He is originally from the small Kurdish village of Khal Dalil in Northwestern Iran and excited to be freshly knighted as a UCF Knight!<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Taoues Hadour is a native of Asni\u00e8res, a suburb of Paris, France. Growing up she was fascinated by the English language and the American culture. Therefore, after high school she decided to study English at the University of Paris X. After her sophomore year in college, she decided to move to London to become immersed into the Anglophone culture. She did most of her undergraduate studies by correspondence, and she earned a B.A. and a Ma\u00eetrise in English from the University of Paris X. In 2011, Hadour came to the United States as part of the graduate teaching exchange program between the University of Paris X and the University of Missouri. After one year, she fell in love with teaching and the US. Therefore, she decided to do a M.A. in Language teaching and a Ph.D. in French Linguistics. Her current research focuses on the influence of English on various aspects of contemporary French language in social media. Her research interests are in Sociolinguistics, Bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Pedagogy.<\/p>\nNicholson School of Communication and Media<\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Milos Ajdinovic was born in Pancevo, Serbia and is a filmmaker who specializes in ensemble work as well as the cinema of improvisation. He earned his MFA from the Film and Mass Media Department at UCF, and his B.F.A. in Film and Television Directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. He has directed two feature films \u2013 Preserving the Magic<\/em> and Goodbye, White Guy<\/em> \u2013 which are currently entering the international film festival circuit. His short films have traveled across the world, screening at numerous national and international festivals. His graduation short Dead Man Doesn\u2019t Hiccup<\/em> (2009) has won the award for the Best Serbian Film at the Student Film Festival in Belgrade.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Nicholas Twardus is a recent Feature Film Production MFA graduate from UCF where he completed work on a feature-length body of work and a dissertation that accompanied it. His films, which have shown nationally at festivals, are focused on the natural landscape. Currently, Twardus writes, directs, produces, shoots and edits experimental documentaries that incorporate analog and digital imagery.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Devin Monnens is a game designer, game design instructor, and game historian. He has taught Game Design and Game Studies at the University of Colorado\u2014Colorado Springs, Full Sail University, and Bradley University. His research focuses on early videogames, the history of Japanese videogames, and the history of game design. His game design work and research focuses on how games produce narrative and meaning through mechanics, level design, and worldbuilding.<\/p>\nPhilosophy<\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Stacey DiLiberto was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, but she has lived most of her life in Florida. She was a Burnett Honors College student at UCF and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Foreign Languages: French and Italian and a minor in Mass Communications in 2003. She then moved to New Jersey to pursue a Master of Arts Degree in English: International\/Comparative Literature at Montclair State University, which she received in 2006. Before becoming a professor, she worked in art book publishing in New York City and as a writer and translator of consumer and corporate correspondence. In 2007, she couldn\u2019t stand the cold any longer and moved back to Central Florida. It was during this time that she earned her Ph.D. in Texts and Technology in 2011, a critical milestone in her life given that she was a first-generation college student. Her dissertation, which focused on the use of digital tools to assist translators in more linguistically and culturally mindful translations of French Caribbean women\u2019s literature, was awarded the 2012 Innovative Dissertation Award for the College of Arts and Humanities.\u00a0DiLiberto’s research interests are broad and interdisciplinary and include Caribbean and Postcolonial literature, Latin American Studies, Latino\/a studies (particularly Puerto Rican studies), translation, ecocriticism, and digital humanities. Prior to coming to UCF, DiLiberto was a professor of English and Humanities at Valencia College where she taught courses in literature, composition, Latin American Humanities and Interdisciplinary Honors. During her tenure there, she was awarded NEH-funded grants to study the Mayan Empire in Mexico and Russian culture in Moscow and St. Petersburg.<\/p>\nSchool of Performing Arts<\/h3>\n
\n<\/strong>Vivian Majkowski earned her MFA in Voice and Speech at the American Repertory Theater\/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University where she studied with such luminaries as Nancy Houfek, , David Hammond, Anatoly Smeliansky, Scott Zigler, Marina Brusnikina, Andre Droznhin and Roman Kozak. Majkowski has been studying with Catherine Fitzmaurice since 1991 and was a student of Dudley Knight\u2019s for just as long. She is a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework and was in the first class of the Knight\/Thompson Speechwork series. She has worked as a professional vocal coach in the theatre for such directors as Diane Paulis, Neil Bartlett, Sharon Ott, Janos Szasz, Robert Woodruff, Brian Crowe, Robert Bella and James Bohnen. She is also a dialect coach for film and television counting among her many clients such talents as Kristen Stewart, William Hurt, Rupert Grint, Naturi Naughton, Ben Robson and the late Alan Rickman. She regularly spends her summers at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey as a master teacher and Voice\/Dialect Coach, she has been a company member since 1998. Vivian is a past president of the Voice and Speech committee at the Southeastern Theatre Conference where she instituted a new category of master class for leaders in their fields, the Guest Artist Series, with Patsy Rodenburg and helped usher Kristin Linklater into the Distinguished Career Award. She is on the editorial board of the Voice and Speech Review, the Voice and Speech Trainers Association\u2019s peer reviewed journal published by Routledge. Prior to UCF Majkowski was the graduate coordinator and the director of the Classical Touring Company for Savannah College of Art and Design adapting Shakespeare plays to one hour of stage time for the tours. She is the recipient of several directing and voice awards from KCACTF, numerous faculty recognition awards from SCAD, and is the recipient of the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching and a nominee for the prestigious Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize at Harvard University. Her undergraduate was at the University of Colorado, Boulder in Acting and she also holds an Associate of Occupational Studies degree from the Swedish Institute for Health Sciences and is a licensed massage therapist in extensive Western modalities and a Traditional Chinese Medicine Five Element Theory Shiatsu practitioner, melding her careers in acting and bodywork to holistically engage her voice, speech and dialect students and professionals in the theatre\/film\/tv industries, the business world, members of the clergy and politicians.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Rob Siler is a lighting and projections designer specializing in theatre, dance, and opera. Originally from Washington, D.C., Rob has had the privilege of collaborating with some of the best theatre artists on the East Coast. Recent highlights include designing the lighting and projections for the world premiere of She A Gem<\/i> at The Kennedy Center, lighting for Radamisto <\/i>for Opera Lafayette at The Kennedy Center and the Kaye Playhouse in New York, and lighting and projections for the new play Damascus<\/i> at Florida Repertory Theatre. In 2017, Siler made his Off-Broadway debut with his lighting design of Occupied Territories<\/i> at 59E59. Other companies that Rob has worked with include Monumental Theatre Company, Maryland Opera Studio, Kalandhi Dance, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Riverside Theatre and Weathervane Repertory Theatre. He has also served as the assistant to the lighting designer for A Delicate Balance<\/i> and The Front Page<\/i> on Broadway and the assistant designer for productions at Olney Theatre, the Studio Theatre, the Kennedy Center and Tuacahn Amphitheatre. Siler is a proud, incoming member of United Scenic Artists Local 829 and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Shenandoah University.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Chlo\u00eb Rae Edmonson<\/a> hails from New York City, where she taught in the Drama Department at NYU\u2019s Tisch School of the Arts and ran a graduate fellowship program at the CUNYBA Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies<\/a>. Her research centers on historic and contemporary immersive theatre in New York City, though she is thrilled to expand this study into the multitude of immersive theatrical experiences that Orlando has to offer. Her 2018 dissertation, \u201cUnder the Influence: Drinking and Immersion in New York City Theatre and Popular Entertainment, 1850 to Present,” looked specifically at the role that social drinking plays in cultivating immersive experience.\u00a0Her 2017 article, \u201cThe Aristocrat of Harlem: Slumming, Immersion and Intoxication in Prohibition-era New York City<\/a>\u201d was published in a special issue of\u00a0Performance Research Journal.\u00a0 <\/em>Edmonson\u00a0taught the Theatre History sequence and Intro to Theatre for the Department of Theatre at the City College of New York, as well as English Composition at\u00a0LaGuardia Community College. She was a visiting professor in Graduate Theatre Studies at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in Summer 2017. She was also a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) fellow for three years at CUNY. Chlo\u00eb presents her work each year at various disciplinary conferences (ATHE, ASTR, CATR, PSi). She has also been a long time staff writer for Offoffonline.com<\/a>, a New York City theatre review website. Edmonson holds a PhD in Theatre & Performance (2018) from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) and an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU (2012). She graduated magna cum laude<\/em> with a degree in English and Theatre from Trinity University in 2009. She is originally from Austin, Texas and returns frequently to visit family and friends.<\/p>\n