Marla Bruner has been working in higher education for over sixteen years and in graduate education for thirteen years. She has served in administrative leadership roles in graduate education overseeing student services, academic affairs, and admissions. In the Graduate School at UT, Bruner provides leadership for daily operations related to serving enrolled graduate students. This includes overseeing the degree audit and academic standing processes, thesis and dissertation submission, curriculum management, and managing select events such as Graduate Hooding and Orientation. She works with students, faculty, and staff in offices across campus to ensure quality and high standards in graduate education, to resolve academic and policy issues facing graduate students, and to provide services and administration of activities that foster an inclusive and healthy learning community and ensure that all students feel welcomed, supported, and equipped to succeed.

In previous roles, Bruner has served as the director of graduate education and academic professional faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, director of graduate student services for the College of Graduate Studies, adjunct faculty, and the manager of internal communications at Georgia Southern University. Prior to her career in higher education, she worked in marketing, communications, and public relations.

Bruner’s scholarship focuses on intervention measures and the prevention of stress, dissent, and burnout in graduate students, transnationalism and colonialism in Irish literature, and Irish women writers. She regularly speaks on graduate student stress and advocacy in shaping student experiences, retention, and engagement. She earned her EdD in educational leadership, holds an MA in English, and a BA in communication arts, all from Georgia Southern University. She has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in English composition, British literature, and Irish literature & culture, first-year experience, global engagement, and communication studies.