Four Women Who Have Been Named to Endowed Positions at Major Universities

Lorie Donelle was appointed the Emily Myrtle Smith Endowed Professor of Nursing at the College of Nursing of the University of South Carolina. Shwe had been serving on the faculty at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Part of her research agenda is focused on efforts to educate people on the use and interpretation of information obtained through new technologies in order to help people avoid misinformation and disinformation that can have negative impacts on their healthcare decisions.

Dr. Donelle holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She earned a master’s degree at York University in Toronto and a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

Karin Nisenbaum is the Renée Crown Honors Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University in New York. Dr. Nisenbaum joined the department of philosophy at the university in 2021. Her research centers on topics at the intersection of ethics and metaphysics in the philosophy of Kant, in post-Kantian German Idealism, and in 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thought. She also has longstanding interests in phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory. She is the author of For the Love of Metaphysics: Nihilism and the Conflict of Reason from Kant to Rosenzweig (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Dr. Nisenbaum is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she majored in philosophy. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy from University College Dublin in Ireland and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Phylicia Rashad, dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has been named the inaugural holder of the Toni Morrison Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities at the university. The chair was funded by a $3 million endowment that was part of a $40 million gift to the university in 2020 from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.

An accomplished actor and stage director, Rashad is perhaps best known for her role as Claire Huxtable on the long-running television hit “The Cosby Show.” Dean Rashad is a graduate of Howard University and holds honorary doctorates from more than a dozen colleges and universities.

Amanda W. Dotseth was named the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She is the first woman to lead the museum. She had been serving as interim director. In her combined 19 years of experience with the museum, Dr. Dotseth published extensively on Spanish art, contributed to and curated more than 30 exhibitions, and oversaw the acquisition of major additions to the Meadows collection.