Margaret T. McFadden

As Colby’s chief academic officer, Provost and Dean of Faculty and Professor of American Studies Margaret T. McFadden supervises academic departments and programs and oversees curricular development and the faculty appointment and review processes. Chairs of departments, directors of interdisciplinary programs, the Colby Libraries and Athletics, as well as the offices of Off-Campus Study, the Registrar, Institutional Research, the Colby Writing Program, and the Center for Teaching and Learning are responsible to the provost and dean of faculty. McFadden joined the Colby faculty in 1996 and was previously associate provost. Her service to the Colby community includes, most recently, chairing the Distribution Requirements Task Force and serving on major College committees such as the Committee on Mission and Priorities and the Committee on Promotion and Tenure. She also helped lead the establishment of new initiatives, including the Center for the Arts and Humanities, the program in environmental humanities, and the Cinema Studies Program. Her work reflects her long commitment to engaged scholarship and a fully inclusive academic environment, the latter reflected in her service on Colby’s Task Force on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. She has won teaching prizes at Colby and at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D. following undergraduate work at Wells College. As a scholar, McFadden has explored the representation of gender, race, class, and sexuality in American popular culture, from the 1930s to the present day. Her most recent book, The L Word, was published in 2014, and she is now at work on a project on gender and comedy in the 1970s.