Kathleen Crown, executive director of the Princeton University Humanities Council, works closely with the chair and executive committee to design, develop, and implement strategic planning for the Council and for the humanities at Princeton. She is responsible for the operations and administration of the Council and the several interdisciplinary humanities programs it directly administers. Working closely with faculty, students, visiting scholars and journalists, alumni and donors, and in collaboration with academic units across the campus, she helps to cultivate new initiatives in emerging fields and to promote interdisciplinary dialogue.
A scholar, poet, and administrator, she holds a Ph.D. in Literatures in English from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. As an assistant professor at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, she taught American literature, poetry and poetics, gender and sexuality studies, and creative writing. She has also taught at Rutgers University and Louisiana State University, as well as at Princeton, where her seminars have included “The Politics of Personal Narrative” and “Poetry and the Public Sphere.” Her research focuses on testimonial literature, literary journalism, and African American poetry, and her recent work explores the social function of poetry in modern and contemporary Greece.
Before coming to the Council, she was a director of studies in Princeton’s residential colleges, where she was responsible for advising undergraduates about the curriculum and developing intellectual and cultural programs, including the Mathey Writers Studio, the Firestone Society for book editing and publishing, and the Edwards Collective, a new residential option for students interested in the creative arts and humanities.
Among other awards, she is the recipient of a New Jersey Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a Stanley Seeger Fellowship for research in Greece.
