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1995-1996 index


Distributed January 26, 1996
Contact: Mark Nickel

Nancy Hoffman named director of Office of the President

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Nancy Hoffman has been named director of the Office of the President of Brown University. As director, Hoffman is a member of President Vartan Gregorian's senior and executive staffs. She attends all meetings of the Brown Corporation - the University's governing body - and its Advisory and Executive Committee. She also participates in policy discussions with senior officers, represents the president as requested, and takes responsibility for the president's staff. Her duties also include expediting the office's administrative decisions and setting agendas for executive staff meetings. With the exception of senior officers who meet regularly with the president, others seeking agenda meetings with the president will arrange them with Hoffman.

Until Jan. 1, when her appointment became effective, Hoffman had been vice provost for undergraduate studies at Temple University in Philadelphia since 1993, and a member of Temple's English department. In Philadelphia and nationally, Hoffman has been engaged in improving public education, especially in ensuring the collegiate success of inner-city public school graduates. At Brown, she is a member of the education department.

Hoffman holds a B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California-Berkeley. From 1991-93, she directed Temple's Honors Program and was a Presidential Fellow from 1992-93. She also has been academic services dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and program officer at the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, and she ran the Center for the Improvement of Teaching at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. As an ACE fellow in 1985, Hoffman spent several months studying the curriculum at Brown.

Hoffman has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she was a founder of its College of Public and Community Service; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Portland State University in Oregon, and in the University of California system.

Hoffman's writings focus on education policy and women's studies. She is the author of Spenser's Pastorals and Woman's True Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching. With Florence Howe she edited Women Working: Stories and Poems. She co-edited two volumes of Women's Studies Quarterly: Women, Girls and the Culture of Education (with Lyn Brown); and Women, Race and Culture (with Jean Griffin).

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