In the MIT faculty newsletter: “Non-Native English-Speaking Graduate Students Still Face Significant Disadvantages”

Eric Grunwald

Eric Grunwald is director of and lecturer in MIT’s English Language Studies (ELS) program. An instructor in ELS since 2012, he draws on a wide breadth of scholastic and vocational experiences to help students across the disciplines improve their academic and professional communication skills. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, studied math, physics, computer science, and astronomy before switching to the humanities and graduating with a degree in history. He began teaching English in Berlin, Germany, during the German Reunification, and then worked for several years in technology transfer at Stanford before obtaining his master’s in creative writing at Boston University. (See ericgrunwald.com.) After serving as managing editor at the literary journal Agni, he returned to teaching in 2007 and now teaches a variety of communication courses for bilingual MIT undergraduates and graduate students. He presents regularly at conferences in the U.S. and abroad and has received Institute grants to design an undergraduate creative writing course just for bilingual students and to design a website—writingprocess.mit.edu—to instruct students in a formal writing process. Grunwald became ELS director in July 2022 and serves on the CMS/W Writing Council. He is also a member-at-large for TESOL’s Higher Education Interest Section.