Thomas J. Russell
Founding Friend and Ph.D., Chairman of the Board of Directors, EMCORE

Thomas J. Russell has been a director of EMCORE since May 1995 and was elected Chairman of the Board on December 6, 1996. Dr. Russell founded Bio/Dynamics, Inc. in 1961 and managed the company until its acquisition by IMS International in 1973, following which he served as President of that company's Life Sciences Division.

Carolyn Williams specializes in Victorian poetry, autobiography, theater, and visual culture. She serves as the Executive Director of Writers House. She is a member of the Executive Committee at the Center for Cultural Analysis and leads the Center's Symposium for Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies. Outside Rutgers, she serves on the Supervisory Board of the English Institute and the Executive Board of the Dickens Project. Author of Transfigured World: Alter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (Cornell), she is currently completing a book on the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and working on another about the aesthetic form of Victorian melodrama.

Samiha Matin
Russell Teaching Fellow

Samiha Matin specializes in the analysis of film, media, and culture. For three years, Samiha taught in the Rutgers English Writing Program where she designed the courses Documentary Film, The Moving Image, and Love and Sexuality. For Writers House, she is teaching two new courses she designed: Introduction to Multimedia and New Media for Writers. Samiha is the director of the Writers House Media Group as well as the faculty advisor for The Rutgers Review. In addition, she will be working with Dena Seidel on the Writers House Master Class Series.

Prior to teaching at Rutgers, Samiha worked at Clinica Estetico, the production company of director Jonathan Demme, and at Channel Thirteen/WNET. Currently, she is finishing a PhD at New York University where she is writing about femininity in film and television.

Dena Seidel is an award winning documentary editor, producer and writer.  Dena's credits include films for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Channel 13/WNET, HBO, ABC, The Learning Channel, WGBH Boston, Turner broadcasting and Court TV. She is the recipient of a New York Festivals Award for Best Editing and a New York Emmy Award for Outstanding Editing. The two hour Discovery Channel special, "Carrier: Fortress at Sea", edited by Dena Seidel, won the 1995 Emmy for Best Documentary in the category of Outstanding Cultural Programming. She was also the co-producer, editor and writer of the two hour Discovery Channel special, "Forbidden Depths". Dena was a producer and senior editor of "Science Times" for the Learning Channel. In 2008, her short documentary Spiritual Soccer aired nationally on the PBS series Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

Dena holds a BA in Film, an MA in Anthropology and regularly serves as a judge for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards. A published author, her short stories have appeared in The Hudson Review (New Writers' Edition April, 2005) and 'Half/Life: An Anthology' for Soft Skull Press (2006). Dena's short story "Good Times" was recently published in The Hudson Review's  anthology Writes of Passage.

At Writers House, Dena teaches Digital Storytelling and Documentary Filmmaking for Writers. She is also director of the Writers House Master Class series, a chance for students to discuss the creative process with professional and award winning filmmakers.

We discussed this for some time and decided not to include an apostrophe for the following reasons:

• Writers House belongs to no single group of people. It is an undergraduate learning community devoted to “writing,” broadly construed. Since Writers House is dedicated to reimagining writing in the twenty-first century—a project that belongs to no single department—we felt that including the apostrophe to signify possession would be both misleading and counter to the spirit that led to the creation of Writers House.