Newswise — Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella has announced the appointment of Sonya Stephens, vice provost for undergraduate education at Indiana University, Bloomington, as the College’s new vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty. Stephens, who was selected following an extensive national search, will assume her new duties in July.
While serving as vice provost at Indiana since January 2009, Stephens has led strategic initiatives in support of undergraduate education and faculty development, including the assessment of student learning, advanced the integration of academic programs with student life and learning, and implemented a new general education curriculum.
“Sonya’s extensive record of successful leadership in a range of institutional contexts, her deep understanding of liberal education and commitment to the liberal arts, her understanding of educational strategy and the thoughtful management of change, and above all, her success in recruiting, developing, and retaining an outstanding faculty, will be crucial to Mount Holyoke’s continued strength in the years to come,” said Pasquerella.
Stephens chaired the Department of French and Italian at Indiana from 2007 to 2009 and previously held faculty appointments at the University of London and the University of Manchester, as well as visiting positions at the University of Connecticut and the Université de Paris. Her teaching and research has focused primarily on nineteenth-century French literature and culture, especially the intersection between the literary and the visual. She is the author of a book on Baudelaire’s prose poetry, Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford UP, 1999), which explores poetic and narrative form and its relation to the production of meaning, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals.
The new vice president/dean holds a Ph.D. in French and a B.A. in modern and medieval languages from the University of Cambridge, along with an M.A. in French studies from the Université de Montréal. She was educated in a women’s college at the University of Cambridge and spent 15 years as a faculty member at Royal Holloway, University of London, a college focused on the arts and sciences that was founded for the education of women in 1879. Stephens became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2003 and a Fellow of the United Kingdom Higher Education Academy in 2001.
Located in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College is the oldest women's college in the United States and was the first of the Seven Sisters. The College – currently celebrating its 175th anniversary – is distinguished by its academic rigor, its diverse international community, a worldwide network of influential alumnae, and the conviction that women can and should make a difference in the world.
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