Nancy J. Vickers

Nancy J. Vickers is both President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Italian at Bryn Mawr College, where she served as the 7th President from 1997 to 2008. She began her presidential tenure by presenting her "Plan for a New Century", and when she retired in June 2008, she left the college with a 40 percent increase in undergraduate applications, a completed fund-raising campaign that tripled the goal of the previous campaign, and an endowment that had nearly doubled during her eleven-year tenure.

Vickers received her B.A. degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1967 and her Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1976. Prior to joining Bryn Mawr College, she taught at Dartmouth College and at the University of Southern California, where she also received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. At this institution, she was also Dean of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Vickers is a scholar in the fields of literary and cultural studies, and her interests range from Dante to Renaissance poetry to the transformations of the lyric genre as a result of changing technologies. She is the author of a broad array of articles and the co-editor of multiple volumes, including "Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe" and "A New History of French Literature".

From 2009 to 2014, Vickers was President of the Dante Society of America, and since she retired she has continued to teaching Dante's Divine Comedy to the Bryn Mawr Club of New York City.

On April 10, 2024, Nancy Vickers returned to campus as the guest of honor of the event "Dante's Visible Speech", organized by Professor Luca Zipoli within his course on Dante's Divine Comedy (ITALB207). 

View photos and event details here.