Provost Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Provost & Dean of the Faculty
Claire Tow Professor of English
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Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Provost and Dean of the Faculty, as well as Claire Tow Professor of English, at Barnard College. Previously, she was Dean of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. As an academic leader, Provost Walkowitz focuses on growing new areas of interdisciplinary collaboration, expanding access and success for all members of the College’s community, and articulating the ongoing impact of the liberal arts and sciences on our local, national, and global communities.
For more than two decades, Provost Walkowitz’s research and teaching have explored cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism in 20th- and 21st-century literature. In her scholarship, she has been interested in the ways that writers and other artists create novels, poems, essays, films, and digital compositions that are intended for global audiences. Her research considers how multilingual artworks can help us think about the global dimensions of local communities, including colleges and universities. She is currently writing a book called The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom. An essay drawn from this project, on the importance of research and teaching in world languages, appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Another essay, “One,” about multilingual films designed for global audiences, appeared in the May 2023 issue of PMLA, the flagship journal of literary studies.
Provost Walkowitz is the author or editor of 10 books, including Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature; A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism; and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. She is also the author or co-author of many influential essays and articles, including “The New Modernist Studies,” with Douglas Mao, which has helped to set the agenda for the field of modernist studies over the past decade. She has delivered more than 80 keynote and distinguished lectures in the fields of modernism, contemporary fiction, and world literature in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America, and has a substantial record of leadership service to the profession, including serving as president of the Modernist Studies Association in 2014-2015.
Provost Walkowitz holds an A.B. magna cum laude in American history and literature from Harvard-Radcliffe (1992), an M.Phil. in English literature and critical theory from the University of Sussex (1995), and an M.A. (1997) and Ph.D. (2000) in English and American literature from Harvard. As an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe, she served as the 118th president of The Harvard Crimson, the nation’s oldest continuously published daily college newspaper.