leadership

Betsy Maloney Leaf, PhD, MFA, is the co-License Program Lead in the Arts in Education program. She works with the interarts (visual art, dance, theatre arts) initial license program and teaches undergraduate courses in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction.

Emily Midkiff got her PhD at The University of Minnesota, where she studied children’s literature and literacy. Her research focuses on picturebooks, comic books, graphic novels, fantasy, and science fiction as well as how young readers interact with these formats and genres.

Alex Panos is an Assistant Professor in the Literacy Studies Program at the University of South Florida. Prior to joining USF, she served as an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Dr. Panos’s research interests include critical, disciplinary, and media literacy, childrens' literature, spatial and geographic dimensions of education, and the complex interdependencies of schools and their communities.