Directors
Jonna Perrillo is an education historian and Professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso, and the former director of the West Texas Writing Project, a branch of the National Writing Project (2005-2012). She has served as the Council Historian for the National Council for Teachers of English since 2015. Her publications include Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and the forthcoming Uncensored: Teaching in a Time of Book Bans (Harvard Education Press). She has been published in English Education, Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of American History, History of Education Quarterly, and American Quarterly. Her education advocacy writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, Boston Review, the Austin American-Statesman, and El Paso Matters. With Andrew Newman, Dr. Perrillo directed the NEH “Good Reader” summer program in 2021 and 2023; their co-authored op-eds and short essays for Time Magazine, New York Newsday, The 74, and Post45 (forthcoming).
Andrew Newman is a Professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American Studies and the history of English education. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH in support of his research on the history of the teaching and learning of high school ‘classics’ – books studied by generations of readers. His writing on this topic has appeared in English Journal, Inside Higher Ed, The Conversation, Public Books and English Literary History (forthcoming). He’s also the author of two books in early American studies: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press) and On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
K-12 Education Leaders
Joy Bacon, a participant in our 2021 seminar, is a high school English teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts in Baltimore, MD. She holds a Master’s in Teaching from Johns Hopkins University along with an administrative certificate from Towson University. She leads her school’s English department as well as school-wide literacy initiatives and new teacher support. During her 14 years in education, she has worked in various capacities throughout Baltimore City to train and develop early career teachers, including roles with Johns Hopkins, Teach for America, Baltimore City Teaching Residency, and Baltimore City Public Schools.
Audrey Brimberry, a participant in our 2023 institute, is a TEA-designated Master Teacher who serves as an instructional leader and mentor teacher at La Vega High School. She has dedicated the majority of her career to teaching grades 7-12 in Title I schools in both Waco, Texas and Anchorage, Alaska. Her work in the 2023 Good Reader Institute has led her to collaborate in the development of a summer webinar for Humanities Texas and advocate for humanities education in Texas. She is deeply grateful to the “Good Reader” community for their continued impact on her craft and is thrilled to be serving as a teacher leader in 2026.
Sarah Esberger, a participant in our 2023 institute, is an Assistant Professor in the Reading, Literacy, and Learning program at Longwood University. She worked as a Tennessee high school English teacher for seventeen years and holds a doctorate in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University at Bloomington. Her research passions include advocating for authentic and meaningful literacy experiences for all students and fighting against censorship. Sarah has been a teacher-leader for National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writer’s Program, working in rural districts to improve writing instruction. She has presented her research at conferences held by the Southeastern Writing Center Association, Advanced Placement, and the National Council of Teachers of English.
Administration
Brianna Licerio is the Program Manager for the Department of English at UTEP and will be in charge of grant management, including processing payments and ordering books.
Guest Faculty
Philis M. Barragán Goetz (Texas A&M University-San Antonio) is an Associate Professor of History and teaches classes in Mexican American history, women’s and gender history, Texas history, and United States social and cultural history, and is the Coordinator for the Women’s and Gender Studies program. Her book, Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas, published by the University of Texas Press in 2020, won the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies-Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award, the Webb County Heritage Foundation’s Jim Parish Award, and the Tejano Genealogical Society’s Tejano Book Award.
Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) is Associate Professor of English Literature. She teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, the history of the novel, literary informatics, and book history. She is author, with Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida), of the award-winning The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Buurma and Heffernan’s co-authored work has appeared in PMLA, New Literary History, Representations, Victorian Studies, Modernism/Modernity, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Ruben Espinosa (Arizona State University) is Professor of English and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). He authored two books, including Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011) and has edited two others. He is the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2024-2026), and he serves on the Editorial Boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Palgrave’s “Early Modern Cultural Studies” series, and on the Executive Board of RaceB4Race.
Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida, Jacksonville) is Professor of English and Lastinger Term Professor of Florida History and Culture. She is author, with Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida), of the award-winning The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Heffernan served as project lead on the NEH-funded Viola Muse Digital Edition, which publishes the interviews and essays that local salon owner Muse drafted for the “Negro Writers’ Unit” of the Florida Federal Writers Project (1936-40), and she is currently project lead on the NEH-funded Archivist-in-Training Program, which prepares students to process and reflect on historical materials held by local museums and archives in Jacksonville.
Sarah Levine is Academic Director of the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of literary interpretation and writing in under-resourced urban high schools, with an emphasis on the links between in- and out-of-school interpretive practices. She is also interested in ways that digital media – specifically radio production – can be used as frameworks for teaching reading and writing to middle and high school students. Before pursuing an academic career, she taught secondary English at a Chicago public school for ten years. While there, she founded and ran a youth radio program that used digital audio production as a tool to help make writing and analysis relevant and real-world for students, and to build bridges between school and the world beyond.
Lauren Leigh Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She is also the founder of the annual Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism Conference. Kelly taught high school English for ten years in New York where she also developed courses in Hip Hop Literature and Culture, Spoken Word poetry, and Theatre Arts. Dr. Kelly’s research focuses on adolescent critical literacy development, Black feminist theory, Hip Hop pedagogy, critical consciousness, and the development of critical, culturally sustaining pedagogies. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Equity & Excellence in Education, Journal of Literacy Research, Learning, Media, & Technology, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, English Journal, and Youth & Society and her research on Hip Hop literacies and critical consciousness is the subject of two forthcoming book publications.
Scott Newstok (Rhodes College) is Professor of English and Executive Director of the Spence Wilson Center for Humanities, and the author of six books, including the award-winning How to Think Like Shakespeare. Newstok collaborated with John Guillory on an archival history of the cultural technique of “close reading,” compiling a free online database, “The Close Reading Archive.”
Jonathan Zimmerman (University of Pennsylvania) A former Peace Corps volunteer and public school social studies teacher, Dr. Zimmerman’s scholarship has focused broadly on the ways that different peoples have imagined and debated education across time and space. He is the author of nine books on education history. His most recent work examines campus politics in the United States, the teaching of controversial issues in public schools, and the history of college teaching.