Dr. Charlene Mickens Dukes became the interim president of Montgomery College, a public community college in Montgomery County, Maryland, in August 2021. Previously, she was President of Prince George’s Community College for 13 years. She is a staunch advocate for student access and success with four decades of progressive leadership, administrative experience, policy development and implementation, fundraising, organizational development, grantsmanship, and local, regional, and national service in higher education.

Dr. Jonathan Holloway, a U.S. historian, took office as the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, on July 1, 2020. Previously, he was provost of Northwestern University from 2017 to 2020 and a member of the faculty of Yale University from 1999 to 2017. His scholarly work specializes in post-emancipation U.S. history with a focus on social and intellectual history.

Dr. Sarah Mangelsdorf  became president of the University of Rochester on July 1, 2019. Previously, she served as provost at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a professor of psychology who is internationally known for her research on social and emotional development.

Dr. Valerie Smith, a distinguished scholar of African American literature, is the 15th president of Swarthmore College, where her priorities have included strengthening and expanding initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion; supporting curricular innovation; improving the campus’s facilities and infrastructure; ensuring the College fulfills its commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2035; and strengthening relationships between the College and the region.

Dr. Lynn Perry Wooten, an expert on organizational development and transformation, became the ninth president of Simmons University on July 1, 2020. She is the first African American to lead the university. Specializing in crisis leadership, diversity and inclusion, and positive leadership—organizational behavior that reveals and nurtures the highest level of human potential—Dr. Wooten is an innovative leader and prolific author and presenter whose research has informed her work in the classroom and as an administrator.

Dr. Dwight A. McBride became The New School’s ninth president on April 16, 2020. With nearly three decades in higher education, Dr. McBride is an experienced leader and accomplished educator and author. He brings this experience to bear as he leads The New School to advance its strength as the only university in the world with a large and comprehensive design school alongside renowned programs in the social sciences, humanities, and performing arts.

Throughout his career, Dr. McBride has encouraged innovation in scholarship and teaching, launched initiatives to build interdisciplinary strength around global challenges, created environments that foster inclusive excellence, and expanded opportunities for experiential learning. 

Prior to his appointment at The New School, Dr. McBride was the provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Emory University, where he also held the position of Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English, and associated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

Dr. McBride previously served at Northwestern University as the dean of The Graduate School, associate provost for Graduate Education, and Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, and Performance Studies. Earlier he served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh.

A leading scholar of race and literary studies, Dr. McBride has published award-winning books, essays, articles, and edited volumes that examine connections between race theory, black studies, and identity politics. His book Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality, a collection of essays offering contemporary cultural criticism, was nominated for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and the 2006 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. He is a two-time Lambda Literary Award winner and has been principal investigator on grants from the Teagle Foundation and the Arcus Foundation. In 2003, he was awarded the Monette/Horowitz Trust 2003 Achievement Award for independent research combating homophobia. 

Most recently, Dr. McBride co-edited the posthumous books of two colleagues: Lindon Barrett’s Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity and Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. McBride is a co-founder and co-editor of the James Baldwin Review, an annual journal, and co-editor of The New Black Studies book series at the University of Illinois Press. 

Dr. McBride received his AB in English with a certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University and his MA and PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Siobhan Brooks is a sociologist and associate professor of African American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, whose work focuses on the intersections of race, identity, gender, and sexuality. Brooks is born and raised in San Francisco and in 2008 received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School in Sociology. She is the author of Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry (SUNY Press, 2010), which was inspired by her work as a union organization at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco and explores racial discrimination against Black and Latina exotic dancers. It won the SUNY Press Queer Studies Prize.  

Her recent book, Everyday Violence against Black and Latinx LGBT Communities (Lexington Books, 2020), uses the 2016 Pulse shooting as a launching point to examine the intersections of ideology, and institutions, which promote violence against Black and Latinx LGBT people. Brooks highlights the role of families, healthcare, educational settings, and religious spaces as both sites of the perpetuation of violence, and spaces of transformation. 

Her work has appeared in The Black Scholar, The Journal of Homosexuality, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the anthology, Black LGBT Health in the United States (Lexington Books, 2016), and Inside Higher Ed. Brooks has been interviewed for publications such as The New York Times, Playboy Magazine, NBC News, and has appeared on NPR's 1A segment.