Talia Vestri

Talia Vestri (“Dr. V”) first joined Northeastern as a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in 2020, after serving as a visiting faculty member at Vassar College and at the College of the Holy Cross. Now as an Associate Teaching Professor, Dr. V designs first-year and advanced writing courses where students embark on explorations of community.

In her courses, Dr. V asks participants to seek out networks–professional, academic, recreational; digital and physical–and to develop a rich understanding of the conversations happening within, and about, those communities. We pay critical attention to who is speaking, how they speak, and for whom. Drawing on her interests in gender and sexuality studies, Dr. V implores students to examine complex issues of intersectional identity and belonging as they learn to position their own voices within vast discursive and affective networks. To do so, we take on a variety of writerly positions, from online bloggers to op-ed contributors, science communicators, podcast producers, TED speakers, technical report writers, business marketers, scholarly reviewers, and more.

Outside the classroom, Dr. V’s research investigates familial and collective relations. Her most recent work, for example, identifies sibling kinship as a framework for inventive ethical and political thinking from the eighteenth century to today. In much of her work, she draws on her scholarly training in nineteenth-century literature and culture to consider how the past and present remain in constant conversation.