kosove Professorship
As part of the Kosove endowment, Harri and Ruth designated funds to create a professorship to recognize USF professors whose careers have brought them national distinction in teaching and service.
In 2010, the Kosove society and the Kosove alumni began the initial stages of bringing this professorship to fruition. The alumni board spent many months drafting the award criteria and an application. Furthermore, the board decided to create two awards; one to recognize undergraduate teaching and one to recognize graduate teaching. Next, the board needed to find a permanent home for the two awards, a USF governing body who was capable of soliciting applications, screening nominees, and ultimately nominating a recipient to be approved by the USF Provost’s office on a permanent basis. A Kosove alumnus and board member, Heather Agazzi, serves as a USF Faculty Senator representing the College of Medicine. She introduced the idea of the Kosove Professorship to the Faculty Senate, Senate Executive Committee as a potential award for their Honors and Awards Council (HAC) to administer. In the spring of 2012, the HAC unanimously approved to award the Kosove Professorship alongside other prestigious professorships administered through this governing body. The HAC worked collaboratively with the Kosove Society to finalize the award criteria and application, and in May 2013 the first two professorships were named.
2022 Outstanding Professorship Awards
Kosove Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Service Award
Dr. Heather Sellers
Born and raised in Florida, Dr. Sellers has been teaching at the college level for over thirty years and is the author of You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know: a true story of family, face-blindness, and forgiveness (Riverhead), an O, Oprah book-of-the-month club selection and New York Times Editor’s Choice also featured on Good Morning America, NPR's All Things Considered, and Dick Gordon’s The Story. Her essays appear in Tin House, Parade, Reader’s Digest, The Sun, Good Housekeeping, O Magazine, The London Daily Telegraph, Brevity, The New York Times, The Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize LXII, and the Royal Academy Journal of Medicine.
Sellers is also the author of five volumes of poetry: Your Whole Life, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses, The Boys I Borrow, The Present State of the Garden, and Field Notes from the Flood Zone. Recent poems appear in Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Field, The Bellingham Review, Agni, Gulf Coast Review, and The Sun. With Elaine Sexton, she is publisher of Combine Books, a hybrid-focused micro-press based in St. Petersburg, Florida and New York, New York.