Laura Hartmann-Villalta, a member of the inaugural cohort of the Jews of the Americas Artist-Scholar Residency Fellowship, led a workshop on artists’ books during the Fall 2025 in-person residency for the fellowship at Brandeis University. The theme of this year’s fellowship is Spine/Médula, with its dual significance as the encasement of the anatomical spinal cord...
During the Modernist Studies Association conference, which had its annual meeting in Boston from October 9-12, 2025, Laura Hartmann-Villalta and writer Jamie Hood explored her newly published memoir, Trauma Plot. The conversation was sponsored by the Intersectional Queer & Feminist Praxis Special Interest Group. Trauma Plot was a 2025 highly anticipated book by both Vogue and Vulture pre-publication and earned a...
This year, we are excited to welcome Mary Y. Yang as the UWP’s second Writer-in-Residence. Yang’s expansive, interdisciplinary work examines the intersections of design with language, identity, diaspora, and cultural memory. She is the co-founder of Radical Characters, a study group and curatorial project that researches and explores graphic design, typography, and culture through 汉字...
Marie Theresa O’Connor has published an essay in AI & Society entitled “AIs as fellow participants in the language game.” The essay argues that LLMs should be deemed to think, not because of anything that we know or believe about their nature, but because of how they use language.
Marie Theresa O’Connor, Associate Teaching Professor in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University, will be presenting at the Digital Humanities Workshop on November 6 (noon-1:30pm) in the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Common Room (Mergenthaler 429). She will discuss her research project, Preserving AI Voices, which collects and preserves screenshots of human/AI conversations. This work was...
Lisa E. Wright’s chapter “Stay Alive: A Black Mother’s Responsibility to Ride Grief’s Hills and Live” was recently published in the collection Parenting While PhDing: Surviving and Improving the Working Conditions of Graduate Student Parents. The chapters in the collection offer valuable advice and strategies to graduate students and administrators from various backgrounds to assist them with...
The University Writing Program (UWP) is continuing its partnership with the Center for Social Concern (CSC) through the 2025-26 Engaged Scholar Faculty Fellows program. Now in its third year, this pilot initiative supports UWP faculty members as they work collaboratively with community partners to enhance student learning. This year’s cohort includes Carly Schnitzler, Jason Ludden,...
Neşe Devenot participated in a Delphi consensus study to determine reporting guidelines for environmental (or “extra-pharmacological”) factors in psychedelic research settings. Devenot was one of 89 experts from 17 countries who participated in the iterative process. The study produced the Reporting of Setting in Psychedelic Clinical Trials (ReSPCT) guidelines. According to the resulting paper, “Their...
Neşe Devenot’s critique of MAPS/Lykos’ MDMA-assisted therapy has been the subject of media attention over the past year, most recently in a July article in Wired Magazine. After Devenot published an Open Peer Commentary on this critique in January 2025, The American Journal of Bioethics(AJOB) received a request for corrections by therapist Veronika Gold, who characterized Devenot’s commentary as...
Expressive Networks convenes an urgent conversation on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry. Tracing how poems circulate through online spaces and how capitalized platforms have come to pattern the reading and writing of poetry, contributors emphasize both the expressivist cast of digital literary culture and the deep-running ambivalence that characterizes aesthetic and critical...
