About us
The CALL Team
Dr. Abigail Sara Lewis, Director
Abigail Sara Lewis joined The CALL as the founding Director in August 2019. She teaches the CALL Internship Seminar.
During her time at the CALL, Abigail has broadened the CALL’s partnerships across Georgetown, spearheaded the CALL Transfer First program, and implemented the Advancing Women’s Service and Empowerment (AWES) Fellowship and Program. Prior to Georgetown, she served as the Vice President of Programs at the American Association University Women, overseeing their national work in salary negotiation, leadership, and campus initiatives. While there she led the development and creation of the Empower leadership series and the AAUW Work Smart Online course, and oversaw the expansion of the Work/Start Smart program into new markets, including, San Francisco, Kansas City, and New York.
Abigail also worked at Barnard College as the Associate Dean of Pre-Professional Advising and as the Associate Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies. While at the Athena Center, she oversaw a curricular and experiential women’s leadership program, co-founded the first international undergraduate research journal focused on women’s leadership, and supervised student delegations that organized leadership training workshops for high school students in China, India, Brazil, and France.
Abigail has worked and taught at Rutgers University, New York University, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a doctorate in history from Rutgers (Major: American History, Minor: African American history, with a certificate in women and gender studies), a master’s from UCLA, and a bachelor’s from Columbia, the latter two in African American studies. Her research on the YWCA’s multiracial activism in the immediate post-WWII era was published in the anthology Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement.
Melissa Bernard, Manager of Professional Development & Programs
Melissa plays a leading role in meeting students’ co-curricular needs and guiding them through the internship search process. She also oversees the Idol Family Summer Fellowship Program.
Melissa spent the last 6 years serving the Georgetown and DC community in a number of roles at the Center for Social Justice, where she most recently oversaw student service-learning experiences and programs designed to enliven our Jesuit mission.
Melissa has a background in education, human development, and Higher Education Administration, having received her BA from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and her MPS from Georgetown University. Melissa is a proud “Former Jesuit Volunteer” or “FJV”, having served with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Washington, DC, after finishing her undergraduate degree.
Anaiya Moore, Coordinator of Operations & Marketing
Anaiya is a graduate of Coastal Carolina University where she majored in Business Management with a concentration in Operations and Supply Chain and has a background in Higher Education and the Nonprofit space. Over the past 6 years, she has dedicated her time to mentoring students unsure about the next steps of their careers, and assisting nonprofits and small businesses alike with improving their overall marketing efforts. She recently moved from NYC, where she worked for a few years in the corporate space in consulting and client service.
Anaiya is currently a graduate student at Georgetown University as well, pursuing her Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional Planning. Passionate about fostering community and ensuring that resources are properly allocated, Anaiya is also the Founder of a community garden in her hometown of Columbia, SC. Her diverse background and experiences have given her a unique perspective on business operations, marketing, and community development.
Dr. Randy Bass, CALL Founder and VP of Strategic Education Initiatives
Randy Bass is Vice President of Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads The RedHouse, an R&D unit at Georgetown University dedicated to educational innovation, equity, and access in higher education. The Red House is home to initiatives, including Designing the Future(s) of the University and The Hub for Equity and Innovation in Higher Education, that seek to rigorously research, design, and incubate programs that challenge current, and innovate new, higher education models.
For 13 years Randy was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). He has been working at the intersections of new media technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning for nearly thirty years, including serving as Director and Principal Investigator of the Visible Knowledge Project, a five-year scholarship of teaching and learning project involving 70 faculty on 21 university and college campuses. From 2003-2009 he was a Consulting Scholar for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he served, in 1998-99, as a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow. In 1999, he won the EDUCAUSE Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Undergraduate Education.
He is the author or editor of numerous books, articles, and digital projects, including recently, “Disrupting Ourselves: the Problem of Learning in Higher Education,” (EDUCAUSE Review March/April 2012); with Bret Eynon, Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2016); and with Jessie L. Moore, Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning (Stylus, 2017).
Tad Howard, Associate Dean for Strategic Integration
Tad Howard is the Associate Dean for Strategic Integration in the College of Arts & Sciences. In this role, Tad supports the development of curricular opportunities that bridge the College and the CALL program.
He joined the College Dean’s Office as an academic counselor in the summer of 2000 and became an Associate Dean in 2010. He spent most of this time advising first- and second-year students, working closely with transfers, and supporting the College’s interdisciplinary programs.
With his family along for the ride, Tad also served as Faculty-in-Residence for 10 years in Kennedy Hall. In recent years, he served as Chief of Staff for the College, co-chaired the College Curriculum Committee, and served on the Main Campus Core Curriculum Committee.
He teaches in the American Studies program, focusing on turn-of-the-century America, college and university history, and Sinclair Lewis. He majored in English at Duke University, earned his M.A. in Humanities at the University of Chicago, and his doctorate in Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Susannah McGowan, The Red House
Director of Curriculum Transformation Initiatives
Dr. Susannah McGowan has taught at the CALL since Spring 2021. Dr. McGowan is the Director of Curriculum Transformation Initiatives at The Red House.
After starting her career in educational development at CNDLS from 2001-2007, she returned to Georgetown in Fall 2019 after an educational and experiential hiatus that included earning her Ph.D. at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014 followed by five years of adventure in the UK where she worked at University College London and King’s College London. While at King’s, she co-established King’s Academy in 2017, a center for educational development supporting integral programs for faculty and graduate students around inclusive pedagogy, assessment, and blended learning.
She works as an advisory fellow of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving equity and student access through course design innovations. She is also the Associate Editor for Teaching, Learning and Inquiry (TLI), the journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
Brittany Toscano Gore, The Red House
Director of Strategy and Communications
Brittany joined the Red House communications team in 2019, with the CALL as part of her portfolio. She works closely with the founding director of the Red House and its philanthropic stakeholders to develop and implement the organization’s investment strategy and direct communications. Through collaboration across the University’s administration, faculty, and students, the Red House works to generate new models of learning environments and experiences that lead to a wider and more holistic range of student outcomes designed to meet the needs and challenges of today’s world and the future.
Over the past ten years, Brittany has held positions across educational institutions where she has helped launch new initiatives designed to address some of the most complex challenges facing higher education.
Before her time at Georgetown, Brittany managed institutional donor relations at the Columbia Journalism School, where she launched and stewarded the school’s Technology Council. Prior to finding her place in higher education, she held positions both in internal and external communications capacities that served clients from diverse industries, including aerospace, finance, and education.
Brittany holds a B.A. in English and Political Science from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and two M.A.s from Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Italian Studies and in Learning, Design, and Technology.
About us
CALL Partners
The CALL was incubated and created by the Red House, Georgetown’s educational R&D unit, and continues to support the CALL. We are fortunate to also partner with several other Georgetown departments and organizations that enable us to offer distinctive opportunities for our students through classes, internship opportunities & more!
Thank you to all of our partners that make our work possible!
CALL Unit Partners
CALL Academic Department Partners
- Spanish Department
- Disability Studies Department
- Government Department
- History Department
- English Department
- Writing Department
- Biology Department
- Classics Department
- Women’s and Gender Studies Department
- French Department
- Black Studies Department
- Education, Inquiry, and Justice Department
- Journalism Department
- Philosophy Department