About Us
Professional Staff
Daniel M. Gross
Faculty Director
Rhetoric PhD, UC Berkeley, 1998
Daniel M. Gross is Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in the Critical Theory Emphasis. At UC Irvine, he also serves as the Campus Writing & Communication Coordinator, which is the office responsible for UCI Writing across the Curriculum, and Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). His research in rhetoric runs along three tracks: writing and communication, history of the disciplines, and medical humanities.
Evin Groundwater
Director
English PhD with concentration in Writing Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2020
Evin (he/him) directs UCI Center for Excellence and Communication and is focused on elevating writing and communication support for all undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars on the UCI campus. He believes that an effective writing center meets writers where they are, is attentive to creating an inclusive and accessible set of spaces and services, and values the knowledge and experiences that writers bring with them into the center. Having worked in writing centers across multiple institutions since being a first-generation undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma, running a writing center at UCI is his dream job. His current research interests include first-gen writers’ experiences with writing support and how masculinity impacts the rhetoric and writing of college-level writers. Evin believes that writing centers work best when they are a driver of campus collaboration, and he hopes that you’ll reach out with ideas and feedback about how the Graduate Writing Hub can best support you.
Hosna Sheikholeslami
Graduate and Postdoctoral Writing Coordinator
Anthropology PhD, Yale University, 2018
Hosna (she/her) focuses on supporting graduate students and postdoctoral researchers’ writing and communication skills. She recognizes the unique challenges faced by diverse writers in the demanding environment of graduate school, and is committed to supporting student writing across diverse disciplines. She is committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all writers can find joy and empowerment in their work, drawing on her background in writing instruction and anthropology. She previously served as a Writing Advisor at Yale’s Graduate Writing Laboratory and as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Denison University. Her research on the circulation of Western social science in Iran has been recognized with awards and supported by several major grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Hosna is excited to collaborate with students, faculty, and staff at UCI to enhance writing support programs and resources. She invites the UCI community to connect with her for support, collaboration, and creative ideas on how to enrich writing and communication across campus.
Graduate Writing Consultants
Nora Bradford
Nora (she/they) is a 5th year PhD candidate in Cognitive Science. Her research focuses on our ability to think about our own thoughts, abilities, and perceptions. She’s interested in understanding how that ability (“metacognition”) transfers from task to task. Before grad school, she worked at UPenn as a lab manager and studied neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy at UChicago. Outside of her research, she’s a passionate science journalist, usually writing about new neuroscience findings for outlets like Scientific American, National Geographic, and Science News. She has also dabbled in script writing for podcasts, a science museum TikTok account, and a PBS show.
Deni Li
Deni (she/they) is an 8th-year PhD student in the Drama department (Graduate Feminist Emphasis), and holds an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. Their research explores ways of navigating selfhood/identity and social dynamics in multiple realities, by bringing performance studies, digital media, and experimental genres of writing (such as autotheory) into conversation with consciousness (and psychedelic) studies, as well as queer, feminist, and trans* epistemologies. Deni’s project traces an alternative genealogy of consciousness studies through a speculative psychedelic, magical, and mad/neurodivergent archive, by looking at dynamics between personal and transpersonal healing, and entangled processes of artistic, cultural, and knowledge production. They are interested in practices of cultivating perception, attention, imagination, and intuition that are animated by a desire for transformation, metaphysical inquiry, and search for meaning. They enjoy working with students on developing concepts/ideas, writing process, and multimodal and neuroinclusive writing practices.
Katya Moiseeva
Katya (she/her) is Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society in the School of Social Ecology. This is her seventh year at UCI, during which she has published sole-authored papers, won prestigious dissertation research grants (including NSF), developed and instructed an undergraduate course, and served as a teaching assistant for over fifteen quarters. Before attending UCI, she completed another Ph.D. in Sociology and worked as a researcher for six years. She has extensive experience in academic writing and is passionate about helping other graduate students—both native speakers and second-language learners—build confidence in writing and find their academic voices. Katya lives in a multicultural household and speaks two other languages, Russian and Italian. Her favorite punctuation mark is the em-dash—because it’s so versatile!