Amanda Irwin Wilkins is the director of the Princeton Writing Program, overseeing the program’s three core initiatives: the Writing Seminars, intensive courses in academic inquiry taken by every Princeton freshman; the Writing Center, which offers one-on-one conferences to undergraduate and graduate student writers; and Writing Across the University, which includes workshops for senior thesis writers, dissertation boot camps, and special six-week courses on writing in science and engineering. Amanda teaches a writing seminar called “Modern Memory,” which draws on her research into how writers imagine war from the home front and navigate the aftermath of collective and individual trauma. She also ventures further afield to co-teach a writing-intensive Geosciences course on climate change. A graduate of Haverford College, Amanda earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton.
Keith Shaw is the director of transfer programs at Princeton University. He worked for ten years in the Princeton Writing Program, most recently as associate director, overseeing the hiring, training, and professional development for the 35 faculty teaching Princeton’s Writing Seminars, taken by 1,300 freshmen every year. These rigorous courses cultivate the habits and skills of critical thought, academic argument, and engagement with scholarly literature to prepare students for the expectations of Princeton’s undergraduate curriculum, including the capstone thesis in the senior year. Keith earned his doctorate in political science from Stanford University, where he studied modern political theory through the lens of environmental sustainability, and has taught at Stanford, Brown, New York University, and Rutgers, as well as for the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Keith has taught Writing Seminars on modern political thought, environmental ethics, and American democracy, the most recent entitled “Governing Humans.”