Valerie Smith (academic)
| Valerie Smith | |
|---|---|
| 15th President of Swarthmore College | |
|
Assumed office July 1, 2015 |
|
| Personal details | |
| Alma mater |
Bates College University of Virginia |
Valerie Smith is an American academic administrator and scholar of African American literature and culture. She is the current President of Swarthmore College.
Smith earned her B.A. from Bates College and her M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Virginia. She began teaching at Princeton University in 1980, then moved to UCLA in 1989.
According to reports in the New York Times, Smith, along with Emory Elliott, Margaret Doody, and Sandra Gilbert all resigned from Princeton in 1989. The reports suggest that the four were unhappy with the leniency shown to Thomas McFarland after he was accused of sexual misconduct. McFarland was initially put on a one-year suspension, but eventually took early retirement after these resignations and threats of student boycotts.
In 2001, she returned to Princeton where she was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and Professor of English and African American Studies, as well as the founding director of the Center for African American Studies. She was appointed dean in 2011. In February 2015, the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College announced that Smith would begin her tenure as the college's 15th president on 1 July 2015. She will also hold appointments in English Literature and Black Studies.
Smith is the author of three monographs: Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987), Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (1998), and Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination (2012). She is the editor or co-editor of seven books, and the author of over forty articles. She has been awarded fellowships from the Alphonse G. Fletcher Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and won Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. She served on the board of Bates College, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the McCarter Theater Center, and on the editorial boards of Women's Studies Quarterly, Criticism, and African American Review.
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