Meet the Writing Studio Consultants
Fall 2025 Writing Consultants
Alysia Shang
Alysia is a sophomore from Los Angeles, California planning to major in English on the Pre-Law track. In her free time, she is on a perpetual hunt to expand her personal taste, whether by trying new recipes, experimenting with paints, or living up to her major by slowly making her way through her to-be-read list.
Ana Cumberbatch
Ana is a sophomore from Atlanta, Georgia double-majoring in Law, History, and Society and English on the Pre-Law track. On campus, Ana is involved in Women in Government, serving as the Vice President of the Public Service Committee. In her free time, she loves to write, listen to music (mostly R&B), and bake!
Aysu Williams
Aysu Williams is a senior majoring in Economics and Human and Organizational Development. On campus, Aysu is involved in Rem and Company, Consulting Club, and Pre-Law Society. In her free time, Aysu enjoys running and reading.
BeJay Mugo
BeJay (she/her) is a senior from Austin, TX, double majoring in History and Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS). Outside of the classroom, she enjoys having dinner with friends, listening to music, and taking long walks.
Caleb Anderson
Caleb is a sophomore from Greenwood, South Carolina, majoring in Political Science and Spanish. On campus, he is a senior editor for the Vanderbilt Political Review, and a member of the Small Town and Rural Students College Network. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with friends and listening to music. Language Fluencies: English, Spanish.
Camile Msall
Camille Msall is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology and Human Development focusing on developmental psychology with a minor in quantitative methods. Her research focuses on understanding children’s early math development, playful learning, and the role of informal and formal math learning contexts.
Daniel Malabet
Daniel Malabet is a sophomore studying LHS and English, with a concentration in Literary Studies. He hopes to one day go to law school after his time at Vanderbilt. Language Fluencies: English, Spanish.
Emma Brownrigg
Emma is a junior from Los Angeles, California double majoring in Philosophy and Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS) on the Pre-Med track. On campus, she serves on Kappa Delta’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and volunteers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In her free time, Emma enjoys hot yoga and reading. Language Fluencies: English, French (speaking).
Harrison Helms
Harrison is a second-year PhD student in the History Department, specializing in early modern Europe broadly and early modern Germany more specifically. He is originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, and holds a bachelor’s degree from Emory University. Outside of research, he enjoys running, listening to country music, and playing cello. Language Fluencies: English, French, Italian, German(proficient) as well as Latin and Ancient Greek.
Jacob Forbes
Jacob is a third-year PhD candidate studying modern German history. He is writing a dissertation on the history of elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors in the post-WWII era. Outside of Vanderbilt, he enjoys playing music and riding his bike. Language Fluencies: English, German.
Josie Betts
Josie is a junior from Chicago, Illinois studying Secondary Education and English. On campus, you can find her DJing and writing for WRVU, doing improv with Tongue N Cheek, or playing alto saxophone with the University Concert Band. In her free time she loves to read, write, see live music, and pet dogs. This is her second year as a Writing Consultant with the Vanderbilt Writing Studio.
Justin Schwab
Justin is a sophomore studying History of Art and Culture, Advocacy & Leadership with a focus on museum studies. On campus, he is involved with VandyWrites, HART Society, and the Vanderbilt Commodore Orchestra, in which he plays viola. He enjoys visiting parks and knitting. Language Fluencies: English, French.
Katelyn Rowan
Katelyn is a junior from Brentwood, TN majoring in English and History with a minor in History of Art. As one might expect, she enjoys reading and writing. She is a sports writer for The Hustler and has been a lifelong fan of Vanderbilt athletics. Katelyn is also an artist, and she tries her best to capture the beauty of nature with her oil pastels and colored pencils.
Leighton Evans
Leighton is a junior from Salisbury, North Carolina, double-majoring in Human & Organizational Development and Philosophy with a minor in Legal Studies. In her free time, she enjoys learning guitar and needlepointing. If you see her around campus giving a tour, make sure to say hello!
Mandy Muise
Mandy Muise (she/they) is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, specializing in cultural anthropology. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Mandy attended Davidson College where they received a BA in anthropology with a concentration in Latin American studies. Although Mandy’s background is in educational anthropology, their current research focuses on contemporary food sovereignty movements in south Nashville. In her free time, Mandy can be found napping with her dog, Moma, or playing an obscene amount of Stardew Valley.
Melody Suite
Melody is in her third and final year of the Master of Divinity program. Previously, she has worked in youth, family, and community engagement roles in public K-12 schools. In her free time, she enjoys long walks, pottery, and reading.
Noah Thacker
Noah is a senior from Pikeville, Kentucky. He is a double major in LHS (Law, History, and Society) and English with a concentration in Literary Studies. On campus, Noah is a member of Vanderbilt Quizbowl and serves as co-vice president of the English Majors Association. In his free time, he can often be spotted looking for new books to read, playing video games, or cheering on his beloved Cincinnati Bengals.
Salik Geelani
Salik is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literature. Broadly, he studies poetics, politics, philosophy, and the varied traditions and apparitions of mysticism in the modern world. His thesis project, engaging Kashmiri, Urdu, and Hindi texts, is a meditation on statelessness and socio-poetic congregation in the context of Kashmir’s long-standing struggle for self-determination. Music (in)forms Salik’s life—without it, he’d be lost.
Language Fluencies: English, Hindi, Kashmiri, Urdu with limited working proficiency in Arabic and Farsi.
Samantha Turley
Sam joined the Writing Studio in 2021 as a Graduate Writing Consultant. She is excited to transition roles and become the Graduate Assistant to the Writing Studio in Fall 2025. Sam is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department. Her dissertation explores the relationship between architecture, labor, materiality, and colonization during the 15th through 18th centuries in southern Peru. Before pivoting to archaeology, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Harp Performance from the Eastman School of Music. Her perfect day would include hiking in the mountains, eating a meal cooked by her family, and reading a book unrelated to her dissertation.
Sarah Ward
Sarah is a fifth-year PhD student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences department. Her research focuses on the impact of crystal and bubble growth on volcanic eruptions. She has cultivated a parallel career in science communication, including writing for MIT Technology Review as part of the 2024 AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Sarah majored in geology at Carleton College. She then spent two years working in machine learning for image segmentation at Princeton University. Outside of academics, Sarah enjoys biking, climbing, and live music.
Savanah Stewart
Savanah is a first-year graduate student pursuing a Master of Multilingual Learner Education with a concentration in Applied Language and Literacies Studies. She studied Secondary English Education at Mississippi State University before coming to Vanderbilt University. In her free time, she enjoys reading, knitting, studying Spanish, and playing with her cat, Tarp. Language Fluencies: English, Spanish.
Skyler Wilhoit
Skyler (she/her) is a junior from Quincy, Illinois, majoring in Sociology with a minor in Legal Studies. On campus, she is involved in First VU and Vanderbilt Prison Project. When not working at the writing studio, you can find her thrifting, watching trashy reality TV, or aspiring to be Gordon Ramsay’s next head chef.
Sochanita Deu
Sochanita is a junior double-majoring in Child Development and Medicine, Health, and Society on the pre-med track. On campus, she works in the BRAINS Lab and VUMC’s Developmental Stuttering Lab as a research assistant. Outside of school, she likes cooking and binge-watching Netflix’s top 10s.
Stephanie Batres
Stephanie Batres is a sophomore from Fayetteville, Arkansas. She is a public policy major with a minor in data science. She loves listening to music and going on runs to de-stress, and enjoys trying new places to eat in Nashville with friends! Language Fluencies: English, Spanish.
Sydney Mayes
Sydney Mayes is an MFA candidate in poetry from Denver, Colorado. She is the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year, and her work can be found in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review and Poets.org among other publications.
William Krause
William is a PhD candidate in the History Department, focusing on modern American political and intellectual history. Before coming to Vanderbilt, he worked as an assistant for the Johns Hopkins University Press, where he helped with their Science and Technology Studies books. When not on campus, he is likely laboring on one of his unfinished knitting projects or watering his many plants.
Wistel Zamor
Wistel is a junior studying Human & Organizational Development and Political Science, with a minor in Legal Studies. Around campus, Wistel is known for his involvement with Vanderbilt Spoken Word and VandyWrites. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Wistel will talk incessantly about his love for long-since departed Russian writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin. When it’s time to get active, he typically plays basketball, soccer, and golf. He also enjoys nature walks and listening to/reading good poetry. Language Fluencies: English, Haitian Creole.
Young Yao
Young is a junior from Shanghai, China, majoring in Political Science and Mathematics. Beyond reading and writing, he enjoys binge-watching sci-fi movies and finding the best matcha in town. On campus, you can find him running with the Vanderbilt Running Club or writing for the Vanderbilt Political Review. Language Fluencies: English, Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese), Wu Chinese (incl. Shanghainese), French (proficient).
Zachary Clary
Zachary is a third-year doctoral student in the history department. Building on work completed at the College of William & Mary and the University of South Carolina, his research explores the political and intellectual history of violence in the United States’ Black freedom struggle. His journalism appears in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Inside Higher Ed, and Smithsonian Magazine, among others. In his free time, he enjoys watching horror movies, binging just about any sitcom, and reading biographies of the great American pencil pushers who keep our government afloat.
Full-Time Staff
John Bradley, Director of the Writing Studio and Tutoring Services
John first came to Vanderbilt to join the Writing Studio team in 2012 and in 2018 stepped into the role of director for the Writing Studio. John earned his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was introduced to writing center pedagogy. As a writing center professional, he is dedicated to the transformational role one-on-one interactions can play for students as they learn to write and has conducted research into the learning experience of undergraduate and graduate student writing consultants, as well. Prior to becoming director, John also taught in the English Department as a senior lecturer, and his teaching and research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary American poetries, with a particular interest in ecopoetry and ecopoetics alongside other movements that push the boundaries of what we expect from poetry.
Megan Minarich, Associate Director for the Writing Studio and Tutoring Services
Megan earned her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University in 2014. During her doctoral studies, she was a graduate consultant and Arts and Science Graduate Fellow at the Writing Studio. She completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tennessee State University before joining the administrative team at the Collaborative Learning Suite in 2017. Megan also serves as Affiliated Faculty in Cinema & Media Arts, where she teaches Introduction to CMA and History of the Musical Film, and as Faculty VUceptor for the Vanderbilt Visions program. Megan has been consulting and teaching collegiately for over ten years. She holds Mellon Certificates in Digital Humanities and Humanities Education, and she has taught multimedia courses in composition, literature, and cinema and media arts at Vanderbilt, Tennessee State University, and Watkins College. At the Writing Studio, she is invested in exploring inclusive and effective writing pedagogy as a means of both developing student skills and voice as well as supporting graduate and faculty writing and research. She is currently investigating best practices in helping students write effectively about visual texts, and she facilitates the Teaching Writing Workshop Series and offers writing pedagogy consultations. She also researches the use of drawing as a consultation tool. At Tutoring Services, she explores how narrative and visual texts can bolster effective learning practices in STEM disciplines, and she is collaborating on multi-institutional research projects regarding STEM identity-building and belonging, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as STEM tutors’ use of metacognitive strategies in tutoring sessions. Megan’s disciplinary research centers around feminism, narrative theory, American modernist literature, visual culture, and early through classical Hollywood cinema. Her in-progress book-length manuscript focuses on representations of women’s reproductive choice in Hollywood cinema between 1915 and 1968: she examines how film’s visual rhetoric shapes and is shaped by narrative theory as well as legal, scientific, and feminist discourses. Her research is published in Studies the Novel and Feminist Modernist Studies (as part of the Modernist #MeToo and the Working Woman cluster); most recently, her article on the censorship history of the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven appears in the Embodiment II: Habitation special issue of Feminist Media Histories, guest edited by Shelleen Greene and Ellen C. Scott. Megan holds a B.A. in English and French from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.A. in English from Stanford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University.
Miriam Erickson, Assistant Director for Tutoring Services
Miriam earned her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University in 2015 where she also worked as a graduate consultant in the Writing Studio. She spent three years as a CASPAR advisor for the Arts & Science College and joins our team to help facilitate Tutoring Services. Miriam’s research examines the Haitian Revolution and a particular group of black militiamen and their families as they navigate the political waters among France, Spain, and Central America. She loves the historiography of rebellion and revolution, and she would be happy to help think through your historical arguments. Miriam has been advising and consulting with students for over ten years, and she believes strongly that the best way to becoming a better writer is working with other writers. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from David Lipscomb University and the American University of Paris (2002) and a Masters in Classics from St. John’s College (2007).
Beth Estes, Assistant Director for Writing Studio
Beth earned her PhD in Political Science from Vanderbilt University in 2017. During the final year of her doctoral program, she served as the College of Arts and Science Graduate Fellow at the Writing Studio and developed a passion for writing pedagogy. She is particularly interested in helping science and social science writers craft compelling narratives and harnessing her social science background to contribute to research on writing assessment. Her other research interests include political psychology and intergroup relations.
Drew Shipley, Academic Support Coordinator
Drew (he/him/his) joined the Writing Studio and Tutoring Services staff in 2022 after earning his PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine. During his time in California, he worked as a tutor and faculty coordinator at Orange Coast College’s writing center and taught writing courses at UCI focusing on mass incarceration, internet subcultures, and political extremism. Drew’s research concerns allegory and metalepsis in Victorian fiction as well as the history and practice of literary criticism. He holds a BA in English from the University of Oklahoma and an MA in English from UCI.
Nauff Zakaria, Academic Support Coordinator and Specialist in Neurodiversity-focused Tutoring and Writing Support
Nauff Zakaria joined the Writing Studio and Tutoring Services staff in 2024. She is a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel in the Graduate Department of Religion; she will defend her dissertation early this fall. Her research focuses on the linguistic and grammatical structures of the Hebrew Bible within the context of ancient Near Eastern literature and its impact on the narratives involving women. Prior to matriculation at Vanderbilt, Nauff earned a MA in Hebrew Bible from the University of Chicago and worked as a high school English teacher in San Antonio, TX. While at Vanderbilt, she has worked at Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching and the English Language Center. In these spaces, Nauff has conducted consultations with undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, developed workshops related to pedagogy as well as writing, and coached graduate student Teaching Assistants. Nauff has a deep passion for education, literacy, and working with underrepresented groups in academia.