Amanda Bower Named to New Holbrook Professorship
Amanda Bower, professor of business administration at Washington and Lee University, has been named the inaugural holder of the Charles C. Holbrook Jr. ’72 Professorship.
Larry C. Peppers, Crawford Family Dean of the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics, announced the appointment.
The Holbrook Professorship honors the memory of a 1972 graduate of W&L who died in 1994. It supports “an exceptional undergraduate teacher and a distinguished scholar at Washington and Lee.” Holbrook was a history major who received his M.B.A. from the College of William and Mary. At the time of his death, he was general manager of Club Los Lagos in Hermosillo, Mexico.
The professorship was created with a gift from William H. Miller III, who was Holbrook’s friend and classmate. He is chairman of Legg Mason Capital Management and the portfolio manager for the Legg Mason Capital Management Opportunity Trust mutual fund and related strategies.
Bower joined the W&L faculty in 2002 as assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2012. An expert on marketing and advertising, she teaches the popular Ad Class, which draws students from all majors to form an advertising agency and to create an advertising campaign as part of the American Advertising Federation’s National Student Advertising Competition.
In 2011 Bower established an annual conference called AdLib, which stands for liberal arts in advertising. She draws back to campus Washington and Lee alumni who are working in advertising and marketing to share their experiences with current students. One of the aims of the conference is to demonstrate to students the value of a liberal arts education for a career in advertising, marketing and related fields such as digital media, social media and mobile technology.
“Her students have described Professor Bower’s teaching as passionate, energetic, enthusiastic and inspiring,” said Peppers. “Her colleagues in business administration praised the way that she has embraced teaching marketing in a liberal arts environment along with her innovations in the classroom.
Bower is widely recognized as an expert in marketing, and her research has been published in the leading journals in her field, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, and Psychology & Marketing. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Advertising.
A graduate of the University of Richmond, Bower received her Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina.
W&L currently has 45 endowed full professorships and 10 term professorships, which recognize worthy teachers who have made meaningful contributions to Washington and Lee but are not yet eligible for a full professorship. The term professorships rotate among faculty.
The University has added 18 of the named professorships and all 10 of the term professorships as part of the University’s $500 million campaign, Honor Our Past, Build Our Future.
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