Academic Leader

Meet Our Contributing Editors

Adrianna Kezar, PhD (Contributing Editor)
Adrianna Kezar is Dean’s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education, at the University of Southern California and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education within the Rossier School of Education. Dr. Kezar is a national expert of student success, equity and diversity, the changing faculty, change, governance, and leadership in higher education. Kezar is well published with 20 books and monographs, over 100 journal articles, and over 100 book chapters and reports. Recent books include The Gig Academy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Administration for Social Justice and Equity (Routledge, 2019), The Faculty for the 21st Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Faculty Model (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and How Colleges Change (2nd ed.; Routledge, 2018).

Laura G. McGee, PhD (Contributing Editor)
Laura G. McGee served as head of the Department of Modern Languages at Western Kentucky University for 11 years. She provided extensive professional development to faculty, aligned learning outcomes with national standards, and updated and refining approaches to faculty evaluation. Under her leadership, the department nearly doubled the number of its languages, programs, and majors. She was also principal investigator for the Chinese Flagship. As a Fulbright Scholar, she conducted research in Potsdam, Germany, and has published on post-unification German film. In 2020, the Kentucky World Languages Association recognized her leadership in the field of world languages with its “Lifetime Achievement” Award. She now consults in higher education administration and world languages. In addition to writing on administration and on film, she conducts academic program reviews and is a team member with LifeStories Matter LLC Intercultural Training and Coaching.

Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD (Contributing Editor)
Rebecca Pope-Ruark is the director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at Georgia Tech, running institute-wide programs focused on writing, mentoring, and leadership development as well as offering one-on-one coaching and consulting. She earned her PhD in rhetoric and professional communication from Iowa State University in 2007 and spent 12 years as a tenure-track and tenured faculty member at Elon University in central North Carolina before serving as the faculty teaching and learning specialist in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Tech. Rebecca is the author of two books: Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Services, and Teaching (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). She is the coeditor of the collection Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First Century Undergraduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). She is also the host of the podcast the agile academic for women in higher education.

Constance C. Relihan, PhD (Contributing Editor)
Constance C. Relihan is dean of University College at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to her arrival at VCU, she served as the associate provost for undergraduate studies at Auburn University and director of University College. She has been committed to the continuous improvement of the undergraduate academic experience through improving general education, strengthening academic advising, and ensuring that undergraduates are provided with the academic opportunities they need to succeed. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an AB in English and earned both her MA and PhD in English from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the structural nature and cultural impact of English prose fiction written during the early modern period. She is the author of Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender, and Elizabethan Fiction (2004) and Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (1994) and is the editor of Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (1996) and coeditor of Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities (2003).