Renée T. White
Provost, Executive Vice President, and Professor of Sociology
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provost@newschool.edu
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Dr. Renée T. White became provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs of The New School on August 1, 2021. She also serves as Professor of Sociology with tenure at The New School for Social Research.
With more than 25 years of experience working in higher education, Dr. White came to The New School from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she served as provost and a professor of sociology since 2016. She previously served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Simmons University from 2011 to 2016. Before working at Simmons, Dr. White served in faculty roles, including professor of sociology and Black studies and academic coordinator for Diversity and Global Citizenship at Fairfield University. She also held a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the African American Studies Research Center at Purdue University.
Dr. White is the editor of four books, including the acclaimed Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions and the recently published Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness, and is the author of Putting Risk in Perspective: Black Teenage Lives in the Era of AIDS. She has served as editor of the Journal of HIV/AIDS Prevention in Children and Youth and as editorial advisor to the Journal of HIV/AIDS and Social Services. Dr. White was also a Wye Faculty Fellow at the Aspen Institute and completed a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in Black film studies. Her current research is in the areas of the impact of public discourse on social policy concerning reproductive rights, representations of Blackness in popular culture, and applications of black feminist theory to higher education leadership.
Dr. White holds an AB with honors from Brown University and an MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was awarded a Mellon Foundation doctoral fellowship. She is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education. She also serves on the Vision 2020 National Leadership Circle and served on the Chief Academic Officers Task Force of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) from 2019 to 2021.