Honoring Professor Kate Ronald

Kate came to Miami from the University of Nebraska in 1996 as the inaugural Roger & Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication, in a unique joint appointment with the Department of English and what was then the Richard T. Farmer School of Business Administration (SBA, now the Farmer School of Business). As the new director of the Howe Writing Initiative in the SBA, Kate said of her appointment:

Over the next 20 years, Kate did just that as an English professor and director of the HWI, then as the second director of the university-wide Howe Center for Writing Excellence in 2012. Along the way, Kate won awards for Teaching Effectiveness (Farmer SBA, 2001), was the inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Instruction and Mentoring (Graduate School, 2006), and was named a Distinguished Educator (College of Arts and Science, 2011) before retiring as Professor Emerita of English in 2016.

Kate taught undergraduates the importance of audience and purpose and beautiful sentences, to “write about something you care about to someone you care about.” [2] She advised numerous graduate students through their theses, dissertations, administrative assignments, and life. She worked with many faculty and students on committees or task groups to improve writing instruction at Miami. In workshops, class observations, and consultations, Kate taught faculty across the university about the benefits of teaching with writing and the need for students to write in multiple disciplinary and professional contexts. She mentored junior colleagues and brought a collegial and feminist ethos to the English department that lives on in the department’s stated principles today.