Benjamin Breyer
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English, First Year Foundation
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Benjamin Breyer teaches writing, literature, and media courses that explore how language, technology, and representation shape our understanding of identity, and culture. At Barnard, his teaching includes First-Year Writing, Introduction to Comics and Graphic Novels, The Webcomics Revolution, Graphic Novel Autobiographies and Biographies, as well as the forthcoming Spring 2026 course AI Literacy in Practice: From Understanding to Responsible Application, a humanities-based introduction to generative AI.
Breyer’s research and pedagogical innovation focus on the intersection of writing pedagogy, generative AI, and multimodal learning. He is the creator of AcademicWritingTools.com, a hypermedia platform that integrates AI-managed writing exercises to help students strengthen argumentation and analytical writing while engaging critically with the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of AI. His work has been supported by Barnard’s Fund for Innovative Teaching and Columbia University’s Provost’s Innovative Course Design Grant.
In addition to his work on AI and composition, Breyer writes on comics and visual narrative, including scholarship on Richard Corben’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe and Clark Ashton Smith, and the cultural infrastructure of New York City’s early comics industry. He has also published on H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and works broadly in pulp studies, examining the circulation of genre fiction across early twentieth-century print networks. His ongoing project, Decoding Lovecraft’s Creative Process: A Digital Analysis of the Fungi from Yuggoth Manuscripts, combines manuscript studies, digital humanities, and AI-assisted textual analysis to illuminate Lovecraft’s revision process.
In my FYW: Legacy of the Mediterranean classes, students typically examine the ways that writers use texts to advance claims to truth, knowledge and authority, and how writers in later time periods have engaged with their ideas. For example, in the fall of 2018, my students read Derek Walcott’s Omeros as a text in conversation with Homer’s The Iliad and Odyssey. The students were intrigued to learn that Walcott resisted efforts to classify his poem as an epic, even though he explicitly invokes Homer’s ancient Greek epics throughout. Through close reading and reflection on Walcott’s text, they came to see how he can be interpreted as critically showing the interplay between Western European culture, as exemplified in its literary traditions, and the Afro-Caribbean culture of the descendants of black slaves on his native island of Saint Lucia. Omeros therefore became in the students’ interpretation a discourse about the effects of European notions of identity on a people originating outside of this cultural sphere, as well as an argument for a uniquely St. Lucian understanding of its complicated history.
I particularly enjoy teaching first-year students the research process and helping them learn how to pose and answer fruitful questions. I like analyzing with students the ways that different disciplines, such as Literature and Psychology, produce knowledge and how that knowledge is reflected in the conventions of writing in different disciplines. Moreover, students in my classes come to understand research as a social act, and that in turn shapes their understanding of the purpose of research and the relationship between the researcher and her audience.
In my own research, I study the ways that writing differs according to academic discipline, and the commonalities among disciplines.