Pitchford, Nicola, PhD

President Pitchford began her tenure as Dominican’s tenth president in 2021. A professor of English and champion of the liberal arts, her research interests and expertise include issues in higher education, contemporary British literature, feminist theory, race and national identity, and landscape writing. Born in the United Kingdom and educated in the United States, she earned an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin, in English, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary U.S. and British literature. Widely published on such topics as the British novel, Black British writing, nature writing, the liberal arts, and global engagement of faculty, she is also author of the book Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter (Bucknell University Press, 2002). In 2022, she was awarded the inaugural Nature Chronicles Prize for her essay, "A Parable of Arable Land." At Dominican, President Pitchford served previously as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty (2014-2021), Acting President (2018), and Dean of the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2011-2014), now the School of Liberal Arts and Education. Before joining Dominican’s senior leadership team, between 2001 and 2011 President Pitchford served as Associate Vice President and Associate Chief Academic Officer, Chair of the Department of English, Co-Director of the Literary Studies Program, and Director of the Graduate Studies in English program, at Fordham University in New York. She is a member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU), and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She has served on the AICCU Restart Higher Education Task Force (2020), WSCUC accreditation teams (2020 and 2018), the National Fulbright Screening Committee (2008), and has been an occasional manuscript reviewer for PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association).

Dominican University of California

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