Staff Directory
Darren Brockes
Writing Advisor
Graham Certain
Writing Advisor
Graham graduated from the University of Chicago in 2023 with a BA in History, focusing on colonial and revolutionary American history. SOSC was a formative intellectual experience for him, and he hopes he can help make it that way for others.
Cameron Cocking
Writing Advisor
Cameron Cocking received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2023, where he taught for the Writing Program and English Department. His work has appeared in Conjunctions. He received the 2023 Daniel and Merrily Glosband Fellowship, selected by Mónica de la Torre, and was named a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize in 2021. He received his BA in Philosophy from Pitzer College in 2021.
Lillian Eells
Writing Advisor
Lillian recently completed her MA in Social Sciences concentrating in History at the University of Chicago. Previously, she earned her BA at Sewanee: The University of the South where she studied History, Politics, and International Studies. In her research, she investigates how folk lore and historical legend is used in nation building and resistance to empire. She seeks to help bridge the gap between academic and public history.
Emma Fromont
Writing Advisor
Emma recently completed the MAPSS program with a specialization in sociology. She previously earned her dual BA in political humanities and film & media studies from Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris and completed a BS in physics from Aix-Marseille University in 2022. Her research interests revolve around identity-making. She explores in particular how ideas about ethno-racial identities are renegotiated in migration.
Letty Ho
Coordinator
Letty is a PhD candidate in Integrative Neuroscience within the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago and is pursuing the College Teaching Certificate from the Chicago Center for Teaching. She has served as both a teaching intern and a graduate student lecturer for the Social Sciences core sequence Mind. Her research investigates the neural representation of sounds and the nature of auditory attention.
Sarah Jeffries
Writing Advisor
Sarah recently completed her MA in Women & Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Prior to this, she studied English and Women & Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her research, she applies feminist and queer theory to mid-twentieth century American literature to examine the potentiality and limitations of popular genres and modes.
Natasha Lasky
Writing Advisor
natashal@uchicago.edu
Natasha Lasky is a writer specializing in early Hollywood and celebrity studies. She writes for podcast Noble Blood and residential architecture nonprofit FORT:LA, and contributed Britney Spears’ Blackout (2022) to Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series. Previously, she worked at the Writing Center at Harvard University, where she received her BA in History and Literature.
Elena Schafer
Writing Advisor
Elena graduated from the MAPH program in 2022 with a focus on 21st century English literature, literary theory, and translation studies. Previously, she has worked as a Graduate Writing Consultant at UChicago GRAD and as a Writing Tutor at Michigan State University, where she received her BA in English and Spanish in 2019. In addition, she graduated from the NYU Summer Publishing Institute in 2019 and worked in publishing in New York City before attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. Her interests include reading literature in translation, writing fiction, and playing the harmonica.
Will Sweek
Writing Advisor
Will graduated from the Masters of the Arts Program in the Social Sciences at UChicago in 2024 with a concentration in History. Previously, he earned his BA in History and Russian from Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa. His research is focused on the cultural history of the Soviet Union during High Stalinism, with an emphasis on the idea of the New Soviet Man as it relates to the aesthetics of resistance.
Mia Thacker
Writing Advisor
Mia graduated from the University of Chicago’s MAPSS program in 2023, with a specialization in political science. They earned their BA in History, Politics, and Economics from University College London, where they also worked as an Academic Advisor for freshman students. They are originally from Los Angeles and have been told by their friends that they are “very Californian.”
Maggie Rothrock
Writing Advisor
Maggie received her M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse with DePaul University. She has worked with writing centers for four years and recently taught two sections of First-Year Writing at DePaul. Her goal is always to teach with humility and compassion.
Nina Valiquette Moreau
Founding Co-Director
Associate Senior Instructional Professor
Nina Valiquette Moreau is a political theorist and historian of political thought who works primarily on ancient Greece, though she maintains teaching and research interests in Roman, medieval, and modern political thought and practices. Her work has appeared in journals such as Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and Contemporary Political Theory, and she is currently completing her monograph, Plato and the Spirit of the Law. Nina was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow from 2013 to 2017 and has since been teaching in Classics of Social and Political Thought as well as classes of her own design in the Department of Political Science.
Sunit Singh
Founding Co-Director
Associate Senior Instructional Professor
Sunit is a historian of the British Empire in India and a University of Chicago “lifer.” He presently teaches SOSC (Power, Identity, and Resistance) and CIV (Colonizations) in the College. Sunit is the recipient of the Wayne C. Booth Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the Glenn and Claire Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Teaching, and the Provost’s Global Faculty Award. Together with Nina Valiquette Moreau, he helped lead the charge to create a writing program in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, which he has co-directed since 2019.