People
Core Writing Team
J Palmeri is professor of English and Director of the Writing Program. Palmeri coordinates the first-year writing program and also provides support to faculty across campus in integrating writing into their courses in ways that enhance student learning. As a scholar, Palmeri focuses on the history and theory of writing pedagogy, multimodal rhetorics, digital humanities, and LGBTQ+ literacies. Palmeri has published two books about the technologically-mediated history of English instruction: Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy (Southern Illinois UP, 2012) and 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy (University of Michigan Press, 2021). They can be reached at j.palmeri [at] georgetown.edu.
Elizabeth Catchmark is Assistant Teaching PProfessor and the director of the Writing Center. Catchmark previously served as an assistant director of the University of Maryland’s Academic Writing Program and a faculty fellow for the Professional Writing Program. She also independently developed and delivered a tutor-training program for the Petey Greene Program, which supports incarcerated learners. Catchmark received her B.A. from Penn State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Her work in writing program administration focuses on linguistic justice in the teaching and tutoring of English, while her doctoral work examined health justice in the long Black freedom struggle. She has research expertise in linguistic diversity, Black studies and the medical humanities.
Jess Batychenko is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department’s Writing Program. Her research and teaching focus on dialog as a powerful tool for learning and community engagement. She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught first-year and professional writing courses and collaborated with nonprofits to collect oral histories and develop K-12 programming.
David Lipscomb is an Associate Teaching Professor who teaches first-year writing, Approaches to Teaching Composition, Professional Writing, and Cybersecurity Communications. He serves on the board of the Center For Plain Language and also serves on the drafting committee for the first international standard for plain language — ISO 24495-1. Previously, David led a communication consulting company, Redpen21, where he worked with the American Red Cross, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Kellogg, and dozens of other organizations. Before coming to Georgetown, David taught at Wake Forest University and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD.
Monica Maxwell-Paegle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Writing Program specializing in teaching international students. She holds graduate degrees in American literature and education from the State University of New York at Albany and earned her Ph.D. in linguistics at Georgetown University. This background enables her to assist students from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds to strengthen their academic writing skills and comprehend American literature within cultural and historical contexts. Her professional interests include second/foreign language pedagogy, art/literature/culture/humanities connections, and language skills assessment.
Phil Sandick is an Assistant Teaching Professor whose interests include teaching with podcasts, pedagogical theory, and writing research. He received a PhD in English (Rhetoric and Composition) from The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he also served as Assistant Director for the UNC Writing Program. His book chapter, “Lore 2.0: Creative Writing as History” is a part of the collection of essays on creative writing pedagogy, Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? (Bloomsbury Academic). Formerly a fiction editor at The Carolina Quarterly, Phil received an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently directs the Creative Writing Minor at Georgetown.
Rebecca Tarsa is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department’s Writing Program. Her research interests include digital literacies, digital writing interfaces, and first year writing. Her work can be seen in College English, as well as the recent collections Precarious Rhetorics and Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms. She holds a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.