Meet Our Staff

 

The Jill and Marvin Willis Center for Writing Director

Rebecca Hallman Martini

Rebecca Hallman Martini is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Jill and Marvin Willis Center for Writing. She   specializes in writing center studies, writing across the disciplines, and composition pedagogy. Her book, Disrupting the Center: A Partnership-Based Approach to Writing in the University (Utah State University Press, 2022), won the 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication's Advancement of Knowledge Award. Her research has been published in WPA, Across the Disciplines, Writing Center Journal, Praxis, Computers and Composition, and Research in Online Literacy Education. Currently, she is working on two book projects that center student writer experiences in writing centers: Centering Writers: Student Perspectives on Inclusivity and Access (under advanced contract with Utah State University Press) and On Their Own Terms: Writer-Informed Approaches to Writing Center Praxis (under advanced contract with Bloomsbury University Press). She is also the founding editor of the International Writing Center Association's newest journal, The Peer Review: A Journal for Writing Center Practitioners and is working to establish writing center partnerships in Germany and Brazil.

 

Coordinator of writing aCross the Curriculum

Laura S. McKee

Laura S. McKee (publications under L.S. McKee) is Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum. In this role, she teaches in the English department and works with the Writing Intensive Program and the Willis Center for Writing to support programmatic and curricular initiatives, especially those focused on writing pedagogy, STEM writing, and interdisciplinary collaboration. 

 

 

 

 

 

Administrative Team

Mounawar Abbouchi

Mounawar Abbouchi (she/her) is a PhD candidate focusing on late medieval literature. Mounawar is from Beirut, Lebanon. In addition to English, she also speaks French, Spanish, and Arabic (her native language). She has over a decade of experience in advanced writing, as well as in teaching college composition, STEM writing, literature, and language. She loves working with writers on any and all writing projects, especially statements of purpose, application materials, dissertation projects, and creative projects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tina Borah

Tina Borah is a graduate student at the Department of English, UGA. While she now resides in Athens, Georgia, as an international student, she was born in Assam and lived most of her adult life in Delhi, India. Apart from researching and reading, she teaches at the Department of English as a First Year Writing Instructor and works as a tutor and location head in The Jill and Marvin Willis Center for Writing. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, migration literature, transnational literature, third culture theory, and Anglophone literature from the Global South with a special focus on Anglophone writings from the Northeast of India. When not missing her cats or reading about stock markets and AI, she likes to cook and enjoy a well-cooked meal in her free time. She has been published in LARB PubLAB, Southern Review of Books, South Atlantic Review, and Scroll.in India.

 

 

 

 

Yuliia Kabina

Yuliia Kabina is a PhD student at the Department of English with a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies. She serves as location lead at MLC 370, collaborates on administrative projects, and leads a non-fiction writing workshop. She finds working with writers who come to the Center the most rewarding part of her job, as it’s the consultations that prompt and sometimes direct her administrative work and research.

Her writing center experiences (Fall 2022-present) and teaching FYW courses (Fall 2023, Summer 2024) defined her research trajectory: developing one’s writing voice through the best practices found in both fields. In addition to implementing these methods in one-on-one sessions, she developed a series of workshops “Write with Jimmy Baldwin,” aimed to foster critical thinking, dialogue, and experimenting with one’s writing in a collaborative and supportive environment of an extracurricular activity.

Asna Nusrat

Asna Nusrat (she/her) is a fiction writer from Karachi, Pakistan. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and translations in Urdu and English. Her translations can be found on Thousand Languages Project and in Lakeer magazine. She completed her MFA from Arizona State University in 2021 and is currently doing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Georgia. 

Liz Wayson

Liz Wayson is currently a second-year English PhD student at the University of Georgia concentrating in writing center studies. Before starting her PhD, Liz worked as an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Center Director at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. She earned a BA in English from Brenau University and a MA in Modernity, Literature and Culture at University College Dublin. Her research interests include writing center and writing studies, disability studies, and spatial rhetorics. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mingxi Xu

Mingxi Xu (she/her) is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy. Her academic work mainly focuses on philosophical aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysical causation, and she is a published writer in both fanfiction itself and the philosophy of fanfictions. Her writing center tutoring experience (2023-present) and her personal writing experience have jointly shaped her most recent research, which is on collaborative creativity and women’s writing in the digital age.

As an international student from China and location lead for the McBay Science Library division of the Willis Center for Writing, Mingxi enjoys meeting all kinds of writers at her job, and seeks to create a welcoming environment for sincere conversations. When not philosophizing or writing, she also enjoys bird-gazing with her cat, cultivating plants, and baking chocolaty patisseries for her friends.