Julie Jung and Larissa Castriotta Kennedy have been announced as the recipients of the Outstanding University Teaching Awards. Hulda Black and Karen Stipp will be recognized with the Teaching Initiative Awards. They will be honored at Founders Day on Thursday, Feb. 19.
Jung, the designee for Category I, is an associate professor in the Department of English. She earned her Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition and the teaching of English at the University of Arizona. She joined the faculty of Illinois State University in 1999, where she has taught courses at all levels, from general education to doctoral seminars.
Outside the classroom, she mentors graduate students preparing for doctoral exams and writing dissertations. Jung has also served as an academic mentor for the University Scholars Program, which awards scholarships to first-year students from traditionally underrepresented groups.
Under her direction, the first student chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America was formed at Illinois State in 2009. In her capacity as senior editor for JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, she provides mentoring to graduate student editorial assistants regarding the conventions of academic discourse and the rhetoric of scholarly publication. She also works closely with undergraduate students as they prepare applications for graduate school and write presentations to deliver at local conferences.
Jung has received several teaching awards, including the Illinois State 2001-2002 University Teaching Initiative Award and the 2007-2008 College of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching, Humanities. In 2006, she also won the Outstanding College Researcher Award.
Kennedy, the designee for Category II, is an instructional assistant professor in the Department of History. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Boston College in 1990. In 1997, she completed a graduate program in modern Chinese studies at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. She earned a master’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2000.
Kennedy began teaching the history of Chinese civilization at Illinois State in 2005. In addition to teaching, Kennedy is an editorial assistant with the Warring States Project. She worked on a digital index of the Warring States text Zuo Zhuan, edited/copy-edited the first volume of the Warring States Papers, and edited/copy-edited the forthcoming Emergence of China. Kennedy also contributed several entries to the Japan at War encyclopedia.
Hulda Black
Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, where she primarily teaches in the Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) sequence. She received her bachelor’s degree from Ferris State University in 2002, her MBA from Grand Valley State University in 2004, and her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2011. Black also received two graduate certificates from the University of Kentucky, one in health communication and another in statistics.
Black began her career at Illinois State in August 2011. She loves the classroom and bringing experiential projects to her students. Black has also developed a sport-marketing course, where students hear first-hand from sport marketing executives about the challenging and rewarding atmosphere inherent to a career in sport marketing. Outside of the classroom, Black is the faculty advisor for the Sport Marketing Student Association and serves on Illinois State’s Athletic Council. Her research focuses primarily on services marketing, specifically healthcare, health and wellness, sport and faith-based research.
Karen Stipp
Stipp is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work. While she began her academic career studying psychology, she switched to social work while a junior at Olivet Nazarene University. She earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and, later in 2011, a doctorate in social welfare from the University of Kansas.
Between earning degrees, she provided social work services in Illinois and Indiana schools, in private practice, and in Kansas long-term care and assisted living facilities. Stipp’s research focuses in part on health care access issues, specifically children’s health and mental health care.
