Amy Jamgochian is the Chief Academic Officer and Accreditation Liaison Officer of Mount Tamalpais College. She received her BA in English from Mills College, her MA in English from Auckland University in New Zealand, and her PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. She taught in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley for almost 15 years, first as a graduate student and then as a lecturer. As a lecturer in the Rhetoric Department, she ran the pedagogy seminar for graduate student instructors, and taught all levels of courses, with topics ranging from freshman composition to introductory rhetorical theory to hermeneutics. Amy’s research interests include the 19th and 20th century British and American novel, ethics, political theory, and pedagogy.

Jody Lewen is the founder and President of Mount Tamalpais College.

Jody’s involvement dates back to 1999, when she started working as a volunteer. Over the years, she has served as a thought leader in the field of prison education, advocating for the values of high academic quality and inclusivity, as well as serving as a resource to policymakers, practitioners, academics, and the administrations at San Quentin State Prison and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. She was the 2006 recipient of the Peter E. Haas Public Service Award from the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2015 recipient of the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award in recognition of her work to support higher education for incarcerated people in California. In 2016, the organization received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Jody received her BA from Wesleyan University in Modern European History; her MA from the Freie Universität, Berlin in Comparative Literature and Philosophy; and her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include “Punishing Evil: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Spectre of Inmates in the Public Imagination” (in Evil, Truth, and Reconciliation, Rodopi, 2004) and “’So eine Gemeinheit’: On the Use of Irony in Hugo Bettauer’s Die Stadt Ohne Juden” (in Austria and Austrians: Images in World Literature. Stauffenburg Verlag, 2003).