Wagner College is proud to announce that Tarshia L. Stanley, Ph.D., will become its next provost and vice president for academic affairs. She will take office on June 1.
“We are thrilled to have Tarshia Stanley join the Wagner College community as our next provost,” said Interim President Angelo Araimo. “Her record of leadership in the faculty, among students and in the community is inspiring, and she brings with her a tremendous background in teaching and scholarship.”
“From the standpoint of the provost search committee, Tarshia Stanley’s expertise, passions and commitments make her an outstanding choice as the next provost of Wagner College,” said English professor Alison Arant, who chaired the search committee. “She is visionary, student-centered, committed to practical education, and collaborative in her approach to faculty and the larger community. The committee embraced the idea of our next provost as a catalytic leader, and we are confident that Tarshia Stanley will be that leader as Wagner College moves forward.”
For the last three years, Tarshia Stanley has been the dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Sciences at St. Catherine University — known to its friends as St. Kate’s — in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has focused on developing programs and courses that engage the liberal-arts learning process and embrace social justice across the university.
At St. Kate’s, Stanley developed and launched the Integrated Learning Series program to link curriculum and programming across the university in ways that enhance experiential learning in the community. Through this program, participants — including students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members — engage with a selected theme through events, discussions and presentations, in and out of the classroom and at community workshops.
Stanley came to St. Kate’s from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she had been a member of the English faculty for nearly two decades. She served as chair of the English Department and director of the college’s honors program.
Stanley advised Spelman faculty in the development of new career preparation courses based on a model she had previously created for the English Department as part of a United Negro College Fund Career Pathways Initiative implementation grant. The goal was to increase the number of students who transition to meaningful jobs in their chosen fields after graduation.
As coordinator of the Spelman Walmart Initiative for First-Generation College Students, Stanley mentored students, programmed activities and created assessment instruments to address the retention and success of first-generation college students during their first year at Spelman.
Stanley was also the founder and facilitator of the Mothering Our Daughters conference at Spelman College, which for 15 years invited girls ages 7 to 17 and their mothers/mentors to the campus to share in the journey to healthier self-esteem.
Stanley has authored articles critiquing Black women in African, African American and Caribbean cinema as well as Black female iconography in American popular culture. She edited “The Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Literature” for Greenwood Press. She also edited a volume for the Modern Language Association’s teaching series, “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler,” which won the 2021 Teaching Literature Book Award from Idaho State University. Her areas of scholarly focus are film, media studies and African American speculative fiction. She continues to write fiction in her spare time and is working on a sequel to her first novel, “The Book of Ephesus” (Kith & Kiln Media, 2013), published under the pen name Carolina Knight.
Tarshia L. Stanley earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Duke University. She attended the University of Florida for her graduate studies, where she earned both her master’s and doctorate degrees in English.
