The Emerging Leader Award recognizes faculty who have assumed leadership roles within the last five years. These faculty members exemplify UNG's commitment to shared governance and effective leadership.
Leigh Dillard, English Department, is Assistant Professor of English and faculty fellow for the Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (CURCA). She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Papers & Publications: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research and also serves as advisor for both the Phi Eta Sigma Honor Society and the Alpha Upsilon Phi chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society on the Gainesville campus. She is committed to helping her students develop as scholars and uses high-impact practices for service-learning and undergraduate research. She has been a co-chair of the Visiting Author Series and is currently the head chair for the Gainesville Campus Honors and Awards Day Committee. Recent publications include "Teaching the Visual Fielding" (forthcoming in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching the Works of Henry Fielding) and "Drawing outside the Book: Parallel Illustration and Building of a Visual Culture" in Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century.
Sungshin Kim, Department of History, Anthropology, & Philosophy, is Associate Professor of East Asian History specializing in Modern China and Korea. She has worked to help maintain the flagship status of the ROTC program in Chinese language from the Defense Language National Security Education Office and is Program Director of the Southeast World History Association conference and a member of the World History Bulletin editorial board. Some of Dr. Kim's most recent publications include: "Leveraging the China Market: Wu Tingfang's Case Against Chinese Exclusion" in: World History Bulletin, "The Great War, the Collapse of Civilization, and Chinese Visions of World Order" in Peace and Change, and an in progress publication, "Arguing against 'White Policy': Wu Tingfang and Chinese Exclusion" in The First Universal Races Congress of 1911: Empires, Civilizations, Encounters.
Michael Rifenburg, English Department, is Assistant Professor of rhetoric and composition and serves as the Director of First-Year Composition. He serves as faculty fellow for the Center for Teaching, Learning and Leadership (CTLL), has led many workshops for the English Department, and has chaired multiple search committees. In addition, Rifenburg founded and directs Write@UNG and the Write Now Academy. Write@UNG enriches scholarly productivity through a focus on research and writing skills. The Write Now Academy offers participants a shared community in which to cultivate, draft, and submit an academic article. Rifenburg recently published The Embodied Playbook; Writing Practices of Student-Athletes and co-edited Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing.