Faculty Profile

As a professor and higher education administrator, Dr. Hellman has long been invested in student access, equity, and excellence. As Interim Special Assistant to the President from 2022-2024, Dr. Hellman played a crucial role in strategic planning and institutional effectiveness. She oversaw the Office of Communications, cultivating a sense of belonging and connection for the current and extended college community; providing vision for advertising and marketing campaigns to support enrollment initiatives; and collaborating with leadership across the College regarding critical internal campus communications.

Before joining the Office of the President, Dr. Hellman served as a professor in the City Tech English Department from 2007- 2021, with the exception of her time as a 2011 Fulbright scholar in American Literature at the University of Antwerp. She has published extensively on United States literature, including her second book, Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature (University of Virginia). At the University level, she has been a steadfast advocate for developmental education reform, and cofounded the CUNY Writing Discipline Council. A 2021-2022 CUNY Leadership Institute Fellow, Dr. Hellman has a long-standing commitment to public higher education, and has written for and about CUNY’s venerable students for the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Daily News. She holds a B.A. in English and Art History from Wellesley College and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Publications

On Public Education

• “In Defense of the Classroom: Understanding the Kind of Learning that Only Takes Place in Person." New York Daily News. 14 May 2020.
• “Where the Hallway Leads.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Diversity in Academe Special Issue. 28 October 2013: C34-35.
• “Standardizing Tests and Individuals.” Idiom: The New York State TESOL Journal (Fall 2014): 29-30.

On United States Literature

Books

• Children of the Raven and the Whale: Visions and Revisions in American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2019)
• Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home (Routledge, 2011)

Articles & Book Chapters

• “Modernism Delayed, Not Denied: Wharton, Hemingway, and Scribner’s Magazine.” Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism. Ed. Lisa Tyler. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• “Shut Not Your Doors to Me, Proud Libraries!”: The Repatriation of Edith Wharton’s Library." From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors. Ed. Hilary Iris Lowe and Jennifer Harris. University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.
• “New York Unearthed: 9/11, Let the Great World Spin, and the Archaeology of Grief." The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Culture. Ed. Keith Wilhite. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015.
• "Not Even New York Was Enough to Lighten Her Mood:” Teaching St. Herbert—A Tale in Brooklyn. COMMON-PLACE 15.2 (Winter 2015).
• "A Moveable Self: Edith Wharton’s Library and Its Return to The Mount." The Edith Wharton Review 30.2: (Fall 2014): 1-16.
• "A Walker in the City: Lee’s Native Speaker, Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and Whitman’s Cartographic Legacy." Studies in American Culture 36.1 (October 2013): 29-54.
• "Taking Up Thoreau’s Pencil: A Luddite Explores Uses of Technology in the American Literature Classroom." Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice. Summer 2011 (4:4): 77-82.
• “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano: Implementing and Evaluating Writing Across the Curriculum Strategies in Physical Education.” The Physical Educator. Winter 2009(4): 170-179.
• "Chintz Goes to War: Edith Wharton’s Revised Designs for Home and Homefront." The Edith Wharton Review 23.2 (Spring 2007): 8-13.
• “The Other American Kitchen: Alternative Domesticity in 1950s Politics, Design, and Fiction.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture. 3.2 (Fall 2004).