Chatham University’s wonderful humanities faculty:
Carrie Helms
Humanities Department Chair, Associate Professor
Alexandra Reznik
Assistant Professor of Humanities, Women’s and Gender Studies Program Coordinator
Alexandra Reznik is the Sigma Tau Delta advisor at Chatham University and Girls Write Pittsburgh workshop facilitator. She has published in Voices from the Attic, Liberal Education, Lamar Journal of the Humanities, and Western Journal of Black Studies. Her most recent book chapter, which analyzes contemporary poetry that represents Black women singer-celebrities, is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature.
Anissa Wardi
Professor of English
Anissa Wardi’s scholarship is at the intersection of African American literature and ecocriticism. She is a past contributor to journals such as Callaloo, ISLE, and African American Review. She is the author of Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective, and Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color, which was awarded the Toni Morrison Society Prize for the Best Single-Authored Book, 2019-2022.
David Blackmore
Associate Professor
David Blackmore is a memoirist who writes about family, queer identity, and the imperfectly regenerating landscapes of post-industrial northern Appalachia. David has recently completed his memoir manuscript Chemical Works Road, and he has published excerpts from the memoir in in Wordrunners eChapbooks, The Watershed Journal, Rockvale Review, The Fourth River, Northern Appalachia Review, and Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose.
Heather McNaugher
Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing
Heather McNaugher is the author of Second-order Desire and System of Hideouts and three poetry chapbooks, Panic & Joy, Double Life, and Earth is a Planet. An editor of The Fourth River, she has published prose in Fourth Genre and The Bellevue Literary Review. A proud member of The Barbara Pym Society and 2019 Pym conference keynote speaker, she presented and published her paper, ‘“A Plain-looking Woman No Longer Young”: Acceptance as Irony in Crampton Hodnet.’ Her short story chapbook, States of Emergency, won the inaugural Editors’ Prize for Fiction in 2021.
Alison Halasz
Coordinator of Modern Languages
Alison teaches French and supervises faculty across multiple languages. She came to Chatham University after teaching at institutions including Rhodes College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include the intersection of French literature and visual arts, second language acquisition, and the role of textbooks in the language classroom for adult learners.
Alison was a member of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team where she competed around the globe in World Cup Freestyle Skiing competitions.
Selected Teaching Awards and Fellowships: Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Teaching Award, University of Pittsburgh, Lillian B. Lawler Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for excellence in teaching and research, University of Pittsburgh, Outstanding French Teaching Associate, Ohio University
Marc Nieson
Associate Professor
Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir is SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape (Ice Cube Press). He’s received a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University’s MFA, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on the novel, HOUDINI’S HEIRS.
Sheila Squillante
Associate Professor
Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist. She is the author of two full-length volumes of poetry, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, and Beautiful Nerve, (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014.) as well as four chapbooks of poetry: Dear Sunder (dancing girl press, 2024,)In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens Press, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (dancing girl press, 2013). She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University where she also serves as Executive Editor of The Fourth River. She is also an editor-at-large for Barrelhouse Magazine.
Karen Kingsbury
Professor of Humanities and Asian Studies
Karen S. Kingsbury is the translator of two volumes by Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance. A third collection, Time Tunnel, will be published soon by New York Review Books, to be followed then by a biography of Chang, an iconic writer of the Shanghai diaspora and inveterate individualist. Dr. Kingsbury is passionate also about teaching at Chatham, where she offers courses in Asian and Asian American studies and world literature, guides the Humanities capstone completion process, and advises students working on the Asian Studies certificate. As of 2025, she will have taught for the same length of time—14 years—at Chatham and at Tunghai University in central Taiwan.
Jessie Ramey
Associate Professor of Gender Studies
Jessie B. Ramey, Ph.D. is the Founding Director of the Women’s Institute at Chatham University and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. She advises the Chatham Feminist Coalition, the Triota Honors Society, and Planned Parenthood NextGen. She is a historian of gender, race, working families, and U.S. social policy and author of the book, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages. She has received Chatham’s Teaching Excellence Award, the Jane Burger Advising Award, the Feminist Change Agent Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, Pittsburgh’s BEST Ally Award from SisTersPGH, and the Iris Marion Young Award for Political Engagement from the University of Pittsburgh, among others. During the 2025-2026 academic year she will be on research leave supported by an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on her book, “The Struggle is the Victory,” a biography of the activist, coal miner, educator and Chatham alumna Kipp Dawson. More at www.JessieBRamey.com
Chatham Humanities 