Michelle Filling-Brown, PhD

Dean, Academic Affairs

Professor, Writing and Narrative Arts

Michelle Filling-Brown, PhD, serves as the Dean, Academic Affairs. 

Previously, Filling-Brown served as Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. Filling-Brown also chaired the Department of English which includes majors in English/Writing, and minors in Theater, English, Writing, and Gender and Body Studies.  In 2014, Filling-Brown received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, an honor awarded at institutions of higher education in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Filling-Brown was awarded the 2012 Rose and Raymond Green Faculty Scholars Award. 

The cornerstone of Filling-Brown’s educational approach is making the students her primary focus. She is constantly developing innovative strategies for teaching writing.   

Her article “iFeedback: Using Video Feedback for Supporting Student Revision” (coauthored with Dr. Noreen Moore, Journal of College Literacy and Learning, April 2012) highlights her use of video feedback in ECG100 as a valuable tool for engaging with students throughout the writing process. 

In addition to composition studies, Filling-Brown’s research focuses on beauty culture and 20th-century African American women writers. 

In her publication “Images that Sell: The Black Female Body Imag(in)ed in 1960s and 1970s Magazine Advertisements” in Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture (Carol Henderson-Belton, ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Filling-Brown examines the iconography of black beauty as it became interconnected with social and political aesthetics of the era. 

Filling-Brown started the National Body Image Conference in 2016 and has hosted the conference biennially through the ongoing support of multiple grants from the Katherine Alexandra Foundation.  In collaboration with Dr. Mark DeStephano (St. Peter’s University), Filling-Brown serves as the founding editor of the Body Studies Journal.   

Filling-Brown also has been very involved with the English Department’s Theater Program.  For many years she choreographed the Cabrini student musical productions. Additionally, she started the Department of English’s annual One-Act Play Festival, which features staged readings of students’ scripts and the presentation of the Phillip M. Cook Aspiring Playwright Awards. 

She is committed to the first-year student experience and the learning communities initiative. She serves as a Professional Mentor for the National Learning Communities Association.

Filling-Brown is passionate about our social justice curriculum.  She has taught ECG courses on foster care, urban education, race and the media, and rethinking addiction. She is particularly proud of the partnerships she has developed with the Purple Feet Foundation and Fostering Hope non-profit organizations.  She also serves as a faculty affiliate for the Jordan Center for Children of Trauma and Domestic Violence Education. 

Filling-Brown earned Doctoral and Master’s degrees in English from the University of Delaware, and a Bachelor’s in English education from West Chester University.