For Faculty and Staff

• Advising – Belen Vicens (History): She goes above and beyond course content to teach students good study habits, reading comprehension, writing and revising skills, using library resources, and managing difficult assignments. At the end of every semester, she sends a personal email to her top-performing students encouraging them on their success and informing them of scholarships, internships, and other academic opportunities. She invites SU’s Title IX coordinator to visit every course so her students know how to get help, and is a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ rights. She advised the Phi Alpha Theta Honors Society and History Club to ensure greater inclusion.
• Civic Engagement – Alexia Rawlings (PACE): While her “day job” is civic engagement, this colleague went above the call of duty this year. She oversaw this semester’s Issues-Based Advocacy Training, where campus and community members learned lobbying and grassroots organizing. She also supported the successful PACE Showcase and Nonprofit Leadership Summit, with the addition this year of members of the Lower Eastern Shore Humanities Network. She also served as Fulton’s Alumni Speaker at a VIP recruitment event. Off-campus, she is a project manager for Miss Collegiate USA, a Maryland non-profit for young women.
• Curricular Innovation – Eric Shuster (Music): He has developed the Music curriculum with two new courses, Music Video and Music for Video Games, and is collaborating on an interdisciplinary Game Design curriculum. He also created a first-year seminar, How to Write One Song, to be offered this fall, and successfully submitted four Gen Ed proposals. He is redesigning our student recitals as experiential learning and is coordaining our Performance Class. He now teaches Music History after a colleague’s retirement. Under his direction, our Percussion Ensemble has premiered commissioned works, and his Ghost Notes concerts provide unique performance pathways for students.
• Department Chair – Jim Burton (Communication): This chair received multiple enthusiastic nominations for his development of a department culture of trust, empowerment, and autonomy that unlocks the potential of his team members. A chair in another department describes him as a peer mentor, especially with his Academic Program Review report as a model. Under his leadership, this department has seen tremendous success with experiential learning, alumni engagement, and a new Master’s program that already has accepted students for the fall. Nominators note this chair has an “exceptional dedication to teaching, accessibility to our community, profound knowledge in the field, and unwavering commitment to nurturing the success and growth of faculty and students.”
• Diversity & Inclusion – Ross Leasure (English): His entire career at SU, he has been a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. He has served as a student organization mentor and as an Office of Diversity and Inclusion faculty fellow. He has hosted films and literary events featuring different voices and perspectives. This past year, he reinvigorated events for OUTober, National Coming Out Day, and Trans Awareness Day.
• Global Scholarship – Ryan Habermeyer (English): He recently earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study folklore, fact, and fiction in Poland for spring 2025 to continue his publications about people and place around the globe. His latest book, Salt Folk, is eco-fabulist, exploring environmentalism in fantastical scenarios. He also had ten recent publications in both fiction and creative non-fiction. His story A North American Field Guide to Glaciers is published in the prestigious journal Conjunctions, alongside luminaries like Joyce Carol Oates. He won first place in a flash fiction contest at Raleigh Review, which published his winning entry Arcade Baby. His is story, The Wanderers, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
• Research Mentoring – Christa Spillson (English): She supports her students daily through office hours and appointments, and throughout the year, including summer months, by always being available to them. She guides students through graduate school applications, funding opportunities, and journal publications in respected creative writing outlets like the Michigan Quarterly Review and Oakland Arts Review.
• Scholarship - Ethel Barja Cuyutupa (Modern Languages): She won one of most important recognitions for Latino writing today, a bronze medal for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book in English award for her poetry collection, Hope is Tanning on a Nudist Beach. With a prestigious Spanish studies publisher, she has a monograph on the role of poetry in the Cuban revolution. She also published an article in the peer-reviewed journal, Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica. She presented at the Modern Language Association conference and the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies conference, and gave guest lectures on Peruvian contemporary women poets in three different institutions in Chile. She just earned an SU Faculty Mini-Grant for a digital humanities project Beyond the Muses: Latin American Poetry Archive.
• Service to the Community – Christa Peek (CADR): This year, we have three staff winners in different categories, and here is the first. Over the past 15 years, she has earned two Fulton degrees, and previously served with Cultural Affairs. Recently, she has taken an additional role in her department by teaching the Foundations of Conflict and Conflict Resolution course. She also is working with the Bosserman Center for Conflict Resolution by providing mediation services to organizations like Choices Academy.
• Service to the Fulton School – Melissa Bugdal (English): Even with a heavy administrative workload, she serves on five active committees impacting graduate studies, secondary education, assessment, curriculum, and tenure and promotion. She was instrumental in authoring reports to support secondary education licensing and for the Middle States Accreditation team on academic success. She supports colleagues and students through publications, conferencing, peer mentoring, and teaching. She has been instrumental in preparing us for the new Gen Ed, where we will take full advantage of the University Writing Center, which she directs. This semester, she offered a unique course, Writing and Rhetoric: SU at 100, where students showcased their poster presentations to advance the SU Centennial research.
• Support Staff – Kathy Brown (Art): This long-time colleague has risen to the challenge of actively recruiting potential students. She recently coordinated a visit of 40 students and teachers from area high schools to attend Art Major for a Day that included 11 events over 5 hours. That same day, she had a leadership role in the Fulton Spring Arts Festival, overseeing logistics for a silent art auction, glass demo and sale, pottery demo and sale, and live drawing and painting. Her chair says she “is the one constant across the department” who “more than deserves this recognition.“
• Teaching – Grace Clement (Philosophy): This colleague has a well-earned reputation as a master teacher. She was an early adopter of civically engaged courses, weaving public philosophy into the community, and offering specialized courses like Animals and Ethics. Students are drawn to her courses, including Gen Ed, because of her balance of care for students with her high academic expectations. She is a leader in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl program at SU and the Eastern Correctional Institute. She has mentored many students onto graduate school and their careers, while managing to teach an average of 70 students per semester. Her chair says that “her classroom is the soul of our program.”

The Fulton Curriculum Committee reviews new and changing curriculum requests for the school.

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The Fulton School of Liberal Arts supports the professional development of its faculty, as manifested via research and other significant developmental activities that enhance teaching capabilities and contribute to the advancement of knowledge.

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Members:

• Kristen Walton (Chair)
• Catherine Jackson
• Jacques Koko
• Emin Lelic
• Taehyun Nam
• Sally Perret
• Eric Rittinger
• Leonard Robinson
• Michele Schlehofer
• Rachel Steele
• Joerg Tuske
• Joseph Venosa
• Belen Vicens Saiz

The Fulton Public Humanities Program (FPHP) exists to support, organize, and develop academic programs and events that promote public awareness and understanding of marginalized groups, moments, and events in history (up to the present).

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Members of the Fulton Sustainability Committee consider sustainability issues relevant to the school, University and community.

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The Fulton School of Liberal Arts supports excellence in undergraduate and graduate student scholarly and artistic endeavors. Such projects serve to initiate undergraduates and graduates into the wider scholarly and artistic community.

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