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Jenny Adams, associate professor of English, is among four faculty members campus-wide to have been awarded a 2020 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship. John McCarthy, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, says, “With this latest cohort of Chancellor's Leadership Fellows, our campus continues the important work of preparing the next generation of academic leaders. In keeping with the program's goals, this year's cohort brings very great diversity of disciplines, backgrounds, and career paths.”

Chancellor's Leadership Fellowships are designed to cultivate future campus leaders by offering recipients a half-time, one-year, temporary appointment to a campus administrative area with an opportunity to shadow and be mentored by leaders of the host unit. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during the fellowship year. Fellows have the opportunity to participate in university decision-making and to develop and demonstrate capacity for leadership in arenas that are not often a part of day-to-day faculty life.

Adams will be working with Carol Barr, senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate education, on a campus-wide strategic vision of first year seminars as an important component of retention efforts.

“I was so pleased when Jen expressed an interest in working on the first-year seminar program as a focus of her Chancellor's Leadership Fellowship,” says Barr. “The first-year seminars are an identified high-impact practice providing first year students with important academic approaches and awareness of student support resources to help them in their transition to college and achieving success in the college environment. Jen will work closely with faculty and instructors teaching these seminars on this important student success initiative.”

Adams’s current research focuses on academic debt and university life in late medieval England. To this end she is working on a monograph provisionally titled Degrees of Collateral: Debt and University Life in Medieval Oxford. With Nancy Bradbury of Smith College, Adams recently edited a collection of essays titled Medieval Women and Their Objects. Her past research has been on chess and political organization in the late Middle Ages. For her research she has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Newberry Library, and the Mellon Foundation. She has taught a wide variety of courses including: Chaucer, Arthurian Legends, Major British Authors, Medieval Dream Poetry, Medieval Travel Narratives, Utopian/Dystopias, Old English, and Society and Literature.

This story was excerpted from an article published by the Office of News and Media Relations.

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