About Us
Carolyn Dever
Carolyn Dever is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, where she also served as Provost and chief budget officer. Before stepping into her role at Dartmouth, Carolyn held a number of faculty leadership roles at Vanderbilt University, including acting program director for Women’s and Gender Studies, director of graduate studies in English, and Associate Dean, Executive Dean, Interim Dean, and Dean of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science. Carolyn’s was the classic case of a junior faculty member recruited into administrative service early: she was director of graduate studies and of graduate placement at NYU’s English Department before her tenure review there.
Carolyn’s academic work is focused on life writing, including a memoir in progress for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025, and Victorian literature and culture. Carolyn’s scholarly focus on dynamics of power and authority has translated into institutional leadership, where her proudest work has occurred in the development of diverse, inclusive communities for faculty, students, and staff. Carolyn is the treasurer of the board for the ACLU of New Hampshire, the vice chair of the board of her town’s public library, secretary of the board of the Public Books Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Johns Hopkins University Press. Like many academics, Carolyn is part of a dual-academic-career couple: her spouse, Paul Young, is a professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth. Carolyn and Paul are parents to a high-school aged son.
George Justice
George Justice brings decades of leadership, scholarship, and teaching to his work in organizational change and faculty leadership development. Currently Professor of English at The University of Tulsa, where he served for three years as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Justice previously held leadership roles at Arizona State University and the University of Missouri, including Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Advanced Studies (Missouri) and Dean of Humanities and Associate Vice President for Arts and Humanities (Arizona State University). He has also held faculty positions at Louisiana State University, Marquette University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his PhD in British literature in 1994. Justice is the author of How to Be a Dean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), and he has written extensively on faculty and administrative life for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Times Higher Education. He has published widely on eighteenth-century literature, and his co-edited edition of Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence was named one of 12 best scholarly books of 2024 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is married to Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State and a leading authority on Jane Austen, women’s writing, and the history of Roller Derby.