Dwight A. McBride

About

Dr. Dwight A. McBride became The New School’s ninth president on April 16, 2020. With nearly three decades in higher education, Dr. McBride is an experienced leader and accomplished educator and author. He brings this experience to bear as he leads The New School to advance its strength as the only university in the world with a large and comprehensive design school alongside renowned programs in the social sciences, humanities, and performing arts.

Throughout his career, Dr. McBride has encouraged innovation in scholarship and teaching, launched initiatives to build interdisciplinary strength around global challenges, created environments that foster inclusive excellence, and expanded opportunities for experiential learning.

Prior to his appointment at The New School, Dr. McBride was the provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at Emory University, where he also held the position of Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English, and associated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Dr. McBride previously served at Northwestern University as the dean of The Graduate School, associate provost for Graduate Education, and Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, and Performance Studies. Earlier he served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh.

A leading scholar of race and literary studies, Dr. McBride has published award-winning books, essays, articles, and edited volumes that examine connections between race theory, black studies, and identity politics. His book Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality, a collection of essays offering contemporary cultural criticism, was nominated for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and the 2006 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. He is a two-time Lambda Literary Award winner and has been principal investigator on grants from the Teagle Foundation and the Arcus Foundation. In 2003, he was awarded the Monette/Horowitz Trust 2003 Achievement Award for independent research combating homophobia.

Most recently, Dr. McBride co-edited the posthumous books of two colleagues: Lindon Barrett’s Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity and Vincent Woodard’s The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. McBride is a co-founder and co-editor of the James Baldwin Review, an annual journal, and co-editor of The New Black Studies book series at the University of Illinois Press.

Dr. McBride received his AB in English with a certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University and his MA and PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.