Fall Convocation To Kick Off New Academic Year The W&L community is invited to the 2022 Convocation on the Front Lawn on Sept. 7 at 5:30 p.m.

By W&L News Office
August 25, 2022

The W&L community is invited to celebrate a new academic year with Convocation on the Front Lawn on Sept. 7 at 5:30 p.m. Dinner will follow on Cannan Green. This is a great opportunity to meet the first-year students, as well as to welcome seniors and third-year law students back for their final year.

Provost Lena Hill will provide this year’s remarks. Hill is a passionate advocate of liberal arts education, and she serves on national boards and consortia including the National Humanities Alliance, the Modern Language Publications Committee, the Modernism/Modernity Editorial Board and the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Steering Committee. She is dedicated to working with faculty to deliver an academic experience to students that prepares them to flourish after graduating from W&L.

Hill joined Washington and Lee in 2018 as Dean of the College and was named Provost in 2021. Prior to joining W&L, she was associate vice president and interim chief diversity officer at the University of Iowa, leading three major units of the university — the Center for Diversity and Enrichment, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Resources Team. She joined the faculty at Iowa in 2006 as an assistant professor of English and African American studies, receiving tenure as an associate professor in 2013. In 2011, she received the James N. Murray Faculty Award, awarded by the Beta Iota Circle of Omicron Delta Kappa to an assistant professor for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Hill holds a bachelor’s degree from Howard University with additional study at Williams College and at Richmond College in Florence, Italy, and a doctorate in English from Yale University. After teaching at Yale and the North Carolina School of the Arts, she received a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University before taking her position at the University of Iowa.

Hill’s scholarship focuses on African American literature, primarily of the 20th century. She is the author of the 2014 book “Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition,” as well as two books co-authored with her husband, Michael Hill, professor and chair of the Africana studies program and inaugural director of the DeLaney Center at W&L. She has also published numerous essays, chapters and reviews, as well as delivered more than 50 papers and professional presentations.

Read the full text of Provost Hill’s remarks.