Administrative Staff - Staff Directory - Writing Center
Leigh Ann Dunning, PhD
Writing Center Director and Associate Director of the Writing Program
Leigh Ann Dunning has spent her life writing and her career teaching writing. She earned her doctorate from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Composition and TESOL. She has written for academic publishers, national magazines, and local newspapers, and she's found a home in the Writing Center with tutors who share her love for connecting with others through writing. When you see her, she'll probably have a notebook and pen in hand and her iPad at the ready. Her most recent major writing project was her dissertation, which explored the experiences of undergraduate tutors conducting research using interviewing as their method of inquiry. She recently co-authored a chapter in Writing Program Architecture: Thirty Cases for Reference and Research from Utah State University Press, and she has presented scholarly work at the International Writing Center Association, the National Conference on Peer Tutoring and Writing, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the Thomas R. Watson Conference, among others. Beyond writing and teaching, she enjoys cooking tasty Italian dishes and exploring Florida with her husband and three children via bicycle and kayak.
Yanhong Zuo, PhD
Writing Center Assistant Director and Brown Teacher-Scholar Fellow
Being an English learner and educator, Yanhong found her passion in teaching academic writing and earned her PhD in education from Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester in 2023. She enjoys working with students of diverse backgrounds and sharing her learning experiences with them. Her research interests include academic writing, digital multimodal composing, and teaching English to students who use English as an additional language. Her recent research project explores what changes the digital age has brought to writing and how instructors can respond to these changes and adapt their pedagogical approaches to meet students’ needs in the digital age. She coauthored a book on academic writing, An A to W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Her most recent publication, Negotiating Polycentric Power Relations in China Through Digital Multimodal Composing in TESOL Quarterly explored instructors’ experiences of using digital multimodal composing as a pedagogical approach. She has presented her work at national conferences such as the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference and the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and traveling with her husband and two kids.