Dr. Lauren Fitzgerald, director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center and chair of the English department at Yeshiva College, has been promoted to full professor of English at Yeshiva University.

Dr. Lauren Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald has served as the director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center since 1997, a role in which she has prepared hundreds of student tutors and dozens of faculty consultants to work with thousands of writers from the YU community: students, faculty, staff and alumni. Fitzgerald also teaches courses on academic writing, digital and multimodal composing, writing research and pedagogy, authorship, and Romantic-period British literature. Her research in writing studies has focused on agency and environment—how students, faculty, and administrators can all be effective stakeholders, particularly in the context of writing centers and writing programs. Her expertise spans areas such as  writing tutor education, writing center research— including that produced by undergraduates—institutional mission and religious identity, and the scholarship of writing program administration. "Due to the sense of urgency I feel about the present state and public perception of higher education, I am deeply concerned with how students, tutors, faculty, and other stakeholders can be active and useful agents in the academic enterprise, perhaps especially because I myself have been fortunate to have spent the majority of my academic career in an environment that has engaged and sustained me, one on which I believe I have had a positive impact," said Fitzgerald. "The students at Yeshiva are exceptional in so many ways, and my colleagues have been wonderful." Fitzgerald felt that the vast majority of her scholarship over the last decade drew on her experiences at the Wilf Campus Writing Center. "My work on The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors, for example, was based on nearly two decades of teaching more than 250 YU students about the challenging, exciting, and important work of helping others learn to write," she said. "Along with preparing these students to tutor, I provide them with staff development opportunities that include local and national presentations and publications. From my position at YU, I have also brought a unique perspective to the scholarship on religious identity in writing classes and programs, a discussion that has tended to focus on Christian students at secular institutions." In a letter to faculty and staff, outgoing Yeshiva College Dean Dr. Barry Eichler celebrated Fitzgerald's promotion. "We are delighted that her outstanding teaching, scholarly work and service to the University have been recognized in this significant way," he said.