Dr. Dwight A. McBride will become the ninth President of The New School in Spring 2020. President-elect McBride is a deeply experienced academic leader and a preeminent scholar and award-winning author of numerous publications on race, literary studies, black studies and identity politics. He is currently the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Emory University, where he is also the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English, and Associated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
He was instrumental in creating Emory’s strategic framework that prioritizes faculty excellence, a compelling student experience, and a strengthened connection between the University and the City. He has also advanced interdisciplinary connections, academic innovation and entrepreneurship.
President-elect McBride was previously Dean of The Graduate School and Associate Provost for Graduate Education at Northwestern University, where he was also the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, and Performance. He previously served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chair of Northwestern’s African American Studies Department, and a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh.
A leading scholar of race and literary studies, President-elect 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 Monette/Horowitz Trust 2003 Achievement Award for independent research that combats homophobia.
Most recently, President-elect 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 US 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 co-founder and co-editor of the annual journal, the James Baldwin Review, co-editor of The New Black Studies Series at the University of Illinois Press, and is currently completing a new book on Phillis Wheatley and her critics. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his MA and PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.
