The Program in Professional Writing is administered by a small team of teacher-scholars dedicated to supporting our colleagues. The program administrative staff is made up of a director, associate director, and assistant director. Job duties for each of these positions can be found below:
Kay Emmert (she/her) is director of the PPW, a position she has occupied since spring 2020. She works on course scheduling and staffing, student requests, supervising program staff and departmental social media interns, and long-term development of the Program in Professional Writing. In addition to helping to revise long-standing course offerings, she creates writing courses specially designed to meet targeted needs of collaborative partners across campus. She has co-written researched articles about revising a professional writing program. In 2021, she collaborated with program faculty on a grant studying emotion in business writing, and co-presented on this research at the Writing and Well-Being Conference in 2022. As part of her on-going interests in the continuous improvement model for writing program administration, she presented on the role of non-tenure track faculty in curriculum development as part of the CWPA panel at the 2023 MLA Conference.
Hilary Selznick (she, her) began her role as the Associate Director of the Professional Writing Program in Spring 2024. As the Associate Director, Hilary mentors and orients new and experienced BTW instructors to PPW’s business communication curriculum. In addition, she coordinates professional development workshops; designs and revises PPW courses; and assists in writing program administration tasks. Her teaching and research focus generally on rhetoric and writing studies and technical communication. She recently presented her work in these areas at the 2023 Association of Teachers and Technical Writing Conference and the 2024 Rhetoric Society of America Conference. In addition, her teaching is informed by social justice pedagogies, specifically in accessibility, inclusivity, and disability justice which are teaching frameworks she brings with her to the Professional Writing Program. Hilary also designs and leads workshops on accessibility and inclusive pedagogy in community and educational settings, her most recent at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Office for Access and Equity. She is also a recipient of a 2024 English Department’s Undergraduate Teaching Award.
As Assistant Director, Cassidy Short focuses on developing, expanding, and strengthening instructor resources, via both collaborative virtual databases and one-on-one communication. She also recruits, advocates for, and supports graduate instructors. Furthermore, Cassidy takes an active role in the renovation of current BTW courses. She researches current trends in technical communication, composition, and pedagogy to facilitate this curricular revision, and she applies her comprehensive understanding of BTW to the creation of the program’s Annual Report.