People

Michael Monescalchi earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University's English Department in 2019 after completing a pre-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

As an Associate Director in the Writing Program, Monescalchi deals with undergraduate curricula more broadly while also fielding questions about student placement, handling transfer course equivalency requests, and overseeing dual enrollment initiatives.

As the previous Coordinator of First-Year Writing, Monescalchi collaborated on the redesign of the first-year writing course at Rutgers (College Writing) and trained faculty in the new curriculum. He also helped develop the curriculum for both the internship course that trained writing tutors and the inaugural version of the first-year writing course for the Honors College. As a scholar invested in recovering and upholding disenfranchised voices, Monescalchi also teaches courses in American and African American literature and has vast experience teaching Rutgers' first-generation college students through the Educational Opportunity Fund and Rutgers Future Scholars programs. 

Monescalchi's research on race and religion in early American literature and culture has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Early American Literature and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and has been supported by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Society of Early Americanists. He received the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education Award from the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences in 2015.