Macaulay students will tell you there’s a huge difference between a class with a Teaching and Learning Collaboratory Fellow (TLC) and one without. The TLC has fellows who are doctoral candidates as well as a postdoctoral program. All of our members are experienced teachers who help students get the most out of their Macaulay seminars, ePortfolios, and experiences.
Allison Cabana
Allison Cabana (she/her) is a Doctoral Candidate in the Critical Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has been an adjunct at Bronx Community College teaching psychology and at LaGuardia Community College teaching in the health sciences field.
Her research interests span an interdisciplinary breadth and include participatory methodology and pedagogy, critical race, feminist and queer theories. Allison’s dissertation work specifically focuses on Latinx and Chicanx Feminist theories with regard to public health. When she’s not doing academic work, she enjoys spending time with her dog and being outside on a beach, in a forest, or in a park somewhere.
Brandon Ely
Brandon is a PhD student in molecular biology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He conducts his research at Hunter College, using computational methods to study and model host-pathogen coevolution, as well as the prevalence and diversification of the Lyme disease pathogen in the Northeastern US. Brandon is passionate about science education and began his career in education as a science teacher in NYC public schools. Prior to becoming a TLC, Brandon taught biology classes at Bronx Community College and Brooklyn College.
Before starting his PhD and becoming a father to twins in the same year, Brandon used to enjoy an active lifestyle as a triathlete and an avid skier. He hopes to find time for those things again someday, but is enjoying being a dad and dedicating time to his kids.
Andre Fludd
Andre Fludd is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Indian classical music and diaspora studies. He earned his doctorate from the Graduate Center (CUNY), where he wrote his doctoral dissertation, “Indian Classical Music in the New York Metropolitan Area: The Development of a Transnational Ecosystem.” The project examined how Indian classical music became a staple of New York and New Jersey’s world music scenes and Indian American communities. It also addressed community developmental concerns such as education, career trajectories, and identity formation while highlighting how the music genre intersected with socio-cultural movements, including countercultures of the 1960s and the recent #MeToo movement.
Fludd is also a versatile guitarist and student of Indian classical music, which was explored in his master’s thesis “The Electric Strings of South India: A Case Study of Electric Guitar in South Indian Classical Music.” He has taught classes on World music and music appreciation and focuses on using music as a conduit to greater cross-cultural understanding. He has contributed to periodicals including the Routledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism (2019) and Analytical Approaches to World Music (forthcoming).
Rakhee Kewada
Rakhee Kewada is a Zimbabwean geographer and doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include economic development, race and the production of space, and infrastructure. Rakhee’s dissertation research examines structural adjustment in Tanzania’s the cotton and textile industry post Independence.
Prior to working at the TLC, Rakhee taught courses in Urban Studies at Hunter College.
Jean Park
Jean Park is a postdoctoral fellow for the Teaching and Learning Collaboratory at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. She earned her Ph.D. in the History & Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Exiled Envoys: Korean Students in New York City, 1907-1937,” studied the impact of the early Korean-American educational experience in the New York metropolitan area on the broader Korean independence movement. Park has presented her work at international conferences, colleges, and other scholarly forums. Her work on Asian-American educational histories in New York has been published online with The Gotham Center for New York City History, and she has a forthcoming article showcasing her recent role as a Bibliographic Assistant for the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation to be published with Charleston Hub’s Against the Grain. Park has served as a research fellow for the Center on History and Education at Teachers College and at Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia, as well as a teaching assistant at Barnard College. Jean earned her B.A. from Princeton University, where she concentrated in U.S. History and received a Certificate in East Asian Studies.
Joseph Pentangelo
Joseph Pentangelo is a linguist and folklorist. He earned a PhD in Linguistics and a graduate certificate in Medieval Studies from the Graduate Center, CUNY. In his dissertation, he introduced the 360º camera as a tool for language documentation, creating a virtual reality corpus of the Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) language. Research interests include documentary linguistics, historical linguistics, folklore, and witchcraft. He is a graduate of the Macaulay Honors College at the College of Staten Island.
Sonia Sánchez
Sonia Sánchez is a PhD candidate in the Critical Social Psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Sonia was previously an Advising Fellow in the Liberal Studies MA program at the Graduate Center and has taught courses in Psychology (at the intersection of Women and Gender Studies) and Youth Studies at Hunter College and the CUNY School of Professional Studies, respectively. Sonia’s dissertation involves oral histories with NYC-based organizers to amplify and learn from contemporary ways differently historically marginalized communities connect struggles and envision futures toward collective liberation.
Charlotte Thurston
Charlotte is a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on prison scenes in early modern English drama. In the past she has taught writing and literature classes at CUNY and NJCU, worked as a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at John Jay and York College, and served on the steering and executive committees for the Doctoral Students’ Council, the graduate student government of the Graduate Center. She also currently works as a writing consultant for social work graduate students at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work.
