Lisa Perfetti

Lisa Perfetti began as Provost of The College of Wooster on August 1, 2019. Prior to joining the Wooster community, she served for eight years as Associate Dean for Faculty Development at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington where she redesigned programming for the Center for Teaching and Learning, led efforts on inclusive pedagogy and teaching difficult topics, developed training for chairs and search committees, and created a plan for faculty retention. She developed a program on supporting faculty of color that has run since 2014 in the NW5C consortium of five liberal arts colleges in the Pacific Northwest. From 1996-2011, Dr. Perfetti was a faculty member at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she taught French language and culture courses, an English-language course on medieval literature, and a first-year seminar called Living in Nature. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, where she taught at Université Hassan II in Mohammedia, she also developed and regularly taught a course on Francophone Africa. During her tenure at Muhlenberg she also directed both the Center for Ethics and The Faculty Center for Teaching and served on committees devoted to general education, reaccreditation, and institutional strategic planning.

With a B.A. in French from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chapel Hill at North Carolina, Dr. Perfetti has published in the areas of feminist approaches to medieval literature, comic literature and humor, and the cultural history of emotion. She has also presented and published on topics related to higher education including faculty retention, general education, faculty leadership development, and inclusive pedagogy.