Women Named Provosts at Two Highly Selective Liberal Arts Colleges in Pennsylvania

Tomoko Sakomura, interim vice president for student affairs and professor of art history at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, will serve as the next provost and dean of the faculty at the college. A member of the Swarthmore community since 2005, she will assume the position on July 1.

Sakomura joined the Student Affairs Division in 2017 as associate dean of academic affairs. Previously, she served as chair of the art and art history department. She also served as dean of students from 2020 until taking on her role as interim vice president for student affairs last year. Professor Sakomura, whose research explores relationships between text and image in Japanese art and design, is the author of Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Brill, 2016).

Dr. Sakomura holds a bachelor’s degree from Keio University in Tokyo. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from Columbia University in New York City.

Renée Ann Cramer has been named provost and dean at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She has been serving as deputy provost for academic affairs at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Dr. Cramer will begin her new duties at Dickinson on July 1.

At Drake, Dr. Cramer served as faculty senate president, co-leader of the Strategic Diversity Action Team, and chair of the law, politics & society department. She is also the founding co-executive director of the Center for Public Democracy, which works to model civil discourse around challenging issues. Prior to Drake, Professor Cramer taught at California State University. Dr. Carmer is the author of three books including her most recent work Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Midwifery Care (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Dr. Cramer is a graduate of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in politics from New York University.