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Joan Hinde Stewart

19th President, Hamilton College
Joan Hinde Stewart assumed the Hamilton presidency on July 1, 2003. She was formerly dean of the College of Liberal Arts and professor of French at the University of South Carolina (USC). The first in her family to earn a college degree, Stewart also joined the Hamilton faculty as professor of French. She is the first female president in Hamilton's more than 190-year history.

Prior to her arrival at USC in 1999, Stewart was a member of the faculty at North Carolina State University from 1973 to 1999 and chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures from 1985 to 1997. She also served as assistant dean for research and graduate programs for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1988-89, Stewart chaired the North Carolina Humanities Council, and in 1977 she received the university's Outstanding Teaching Award.

Before joining the NC State faculty, Stewart taught at Wellesley College. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1970, having graduated summa cum laude in 1965 from St. Joseph's College, a small, private, liberal arts institution in Brooklyn, New York.

Stewart's scholarship focuses on 18th-century French literature, especially women writers. She has written several books and numerous articles, essays and book reviews, and has been a frequent speaker at professional conferences both in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yale University, the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a fellow at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, a visiting scholar at Oxford University in England, and a fellow at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Letters in Genoa, Italy.

At Hamilton, Stewart has presided over a period of tremendous growth. The physical plant is undergoing a massive reinvestment well in excess of $100 million, the entering classes are setting records for quality and diversity, and the capital campaign that Stewart helped launch just a year after becoming president is at an unprecedented level.

Hamilton's 19th president is married to Philip Stewart, the Benjamin E. Powell Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. The couple has two grown children.


December 2006