Humanities Express

Jacqueline Jones Royster Tapped to Lead the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences

Professor of English and former interim dean of Humanities Jacqueline Jones Royster has been named executive dean of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences and senior vice provost of the university.

Royster brings impressive administrative experience to this post. She was the interim executive dean of Arts and Sciences from June 2004 to the time of her permanent appointment on April 1, 2005. The previous year she was interim dean of the College of Humanities, having earlier served as the College’s senior associate dean for research. Other prior service included stints as director of the University Writing Center and vice chair for rhetoric and composition in the English Department. Before coming to Ohio State in 1992, Royster had been both assistant dean for freshman studies and associate dean for advising at Spelman College in Atlanta, the institution where she earned her B.A. degree. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan.

Royster’s national service roles include the chairmanship of both the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the executive committee of the Division on Teaching Writing for the Modern Language Association. In recognition of her work with Ohio teachers in the State's Ohio Rise Program, she received the Ohio Department of Education's Pioneer Award in Higher Education for 2000. In 2002, she was presented with an Ohio State University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award.

In addition to her substantial service profile, Royster is a scholar of national reputation in three complementary domains: the rhetorical history of women of African descent, the development of literacy, and delivery systems for the teaching of composition. She is the author of eight books, including Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003, which received top honors in 2004 from the National Federation of Press Women and the Ohio Professional Writers Association. Her Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women received the 2001 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Languages Association. Royster’s scholarly prominence led to her selection as a University Distinguished Lecturer in 2003.