WAC Faculty Consultants

The WAC faculty consultants are available to meet with UC Davis instructors to discuss all aspects of writing instruction and support for undergraduate and graduate students. To make an appointment, contact Kendon Kurzer (kckurzer@ucdavis.edu) for undergraduate writing concerns, or Kathie Gossett (kegossett@ucdavis.edu) for graduate writing concerns.  

Kathie Gossett | Associate Director of Graduate Writing Across the Curriculum

Kathie earned a Ph.D. in Writing Studies in 2008 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and joined the UWP as a lecturer in 2016. Her research interests include graduate writing, digital dissertations, multimedia writing/composition, user experience theory & practice, and medieval rhetoric and gothic design. She has published articles in journals such as Kairos and Communication Design Quarterly, book chapters in collections such as The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice and Copy(write), and several white papers for projects about digital dissertations and graduate writing funded by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. Kathie has been teaching writing since 1995 at research universities and community colleges. She teaches a wide range of classes such as graduate writing in the humanities and social sciences, technical writing, user experience design and writing, advanced composition, and multimedia writing.

Kendon Kurzer | Associate Director of Undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum

Kendon finished his Ph.D. in education (with an emphasis in writing and composition studies) at UC Davis a couple of years back and stuck around as a full-time lecturer in the University Writing Program where he teaches a wide range of classes. His previous degrees in applied linguistics have prepared him to work effectively with UCD's diverse student population. His primary research/teaching interests involve supporting multilingual students beyond writing classes into their discipline-specific contexts and written corrective feedback (with four recent articles published on the topic).

Melissa Bender | Interim Advisor to Writing Across the Curriculum

Melissa earned a Ph.D. in English at UC Davis in 2009. As a faculty member in the University Writing Program, Melissa teaches a range of writing in the disciplines and professions courses, including writing in health, science, history, and fine arts. Melissa’s recent publications include a textbook, Who’s Your Source? A Writer’s Guide to Effectively and Ethically Using Resources (Broadview Press 2020) and an edited collection, Contested Commemoration in U.S. History: Diverging Public Interpretations (Routledge 2020). She has served on the Writing Across the Curriculum team for six years and is currently collaborating with one of the WAC team’s former graduate writing fellows on a research project that introduces narrative analysis into a clinical practice course for MSW students.  

Writing Across the Curriculum Consultants

Amy Goodman-Bide earned a B.A. in French Literature from Whitman College and M.A. in Second Language Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. After graduate school, she worked as an academic editor, followed by several years teaching doctor-patient communication and health sciences writing. Since 2017, she has been a lecturer in the University Writing Program, where she regularly teaches Writing in the Biological Sciences (102B) and Writing for the Health Professions (104F). She has also taught across the UWP multilingual writing series (UWP 21, 22) and entry level writing (UWP 7).

Brad Henderson (BSME, MPW) first advanced Writing Across the Curriculum when he served as the Campus Coordinator for WAC at UC Irvine in the 1990s. Since 2002, Brad has been a UWP faculty member specializing in developing and teaching writing classes for engineering, economics/managerial economics, and science majors.  He holds degrees in mechanical engineering and professional writing, and his industry experience with Hewlett-Packard Inkjet Products and Parker-Hannifin Aerospace informs his approach to teaching engineering writing.  He is the author of Math-Based Writing System for Engineers (Springer International, 2020), which debuts an inclusive method for teaching discipline-specific writing skills to engineers in global industry for whom math language, symbols, and metaphors are universal touchstones. He is a firm believer that optimal creative, out-of-box thinking occurs when the Arts and STEM fields meld together to produce STEAM.

Marit MacArthur teaches writing in the workplace and in the sciences, and has expertise and interests in career preparation and development for undergraduate and graduate students, grant writing, and collaborative interdisciplinary research. Marit enjoys helping faculty and TAs in any discipline develop the writing components of their courses; her published research brings together religious, literary, performance and voice studies, speech perception, audio signal processing, statistical analysis, and data visualization. She has held ACLS Digital Innovations and Fulbright Research Fellowships, and co-directed a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant project, Tools for Listening to Texts-in-PerformanceThrough 2025, Marit is a co-investigator on The SpokenWeba Can$2.5 million SHHRC partnership grant. Other projects include a Cal Humanities-sponsored research and documentary film project, Camp to Campusabout first-generation college graduates from a migrant labor background. Marit joined UWP in 2017 and is also a faculty affiliate with the Performance Studies Graduate Group.