Nancy J. Vickers ‘67

2008-2013
Nancy J. Vickers is a scholar, a seasoned administrator, and the immediate past president of Bryn Mawr College, where she served for eleven years. She came to Bryn Mawr in 1997 from the University of Southern California, having worked as the Dean of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.  She was also a Professor of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature.  Prior to her time at the University of Southern California, Vickers taught French and Italian at Dartmouth College from 1973 until 1987.  She was awarded teaching prizes at both Dartmouth and USC as well as Dartmouth’s Presidential Medal for Outstanding Leadership and Achievement (1991).  She has been a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA, and a visiting fellow at Princeton.

Vickers specializes in the fields of literary and cultural studies, with interests ranging from Renaissance poetry to the transformation of the lyric genre resulting from changing technologies such as music video and television.  She has published numerous articles, including “Blazing Beauties: Marot’s Poetic Anatomies” in the 1997 volume The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe and “Lyric in the Video Decade,” in the journal Discourse, volume 16.1.She is the co-editor of Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago) and A New History of French Literature (Harvard), for which she and her co-editors received the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize in 1990.  Her most recent book, The Medusa Reader, co-edited with Marjorie Garber, was published in 2003 by Routledge.

Nancy Vickers received her bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke in 1967 and her master’s and doctorate in philosophy degrees from Yale University in 1971 and 1976, respectively. She is a past member of the Board of the Bryn Mawr Trust Company and the Bryn Mawr Theater Film Institute and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Council of the Dante Society of America.