Colleagues,

I am very pleased to announce that Amy Gutman will be joining the Office of the Provost as Director of Communications, effective August 16. In this role, Amy will develop and lead the communications strategy for the Office of the Provost. A central goal of her work will be to increase the visibility, impact, and transparency of the Provost’s and University initiatives to advance academic excellence, financial sustainability and operational effectiveness, and community. To this end, she will work closely with colleagues in the Office of University Communications, the Office of the President, and communications leads across campus.

Amy comes to Brown from Wellesley College, where she held the post of Senior Communications Advisor, working closely with President Paula A. Johnson on speeches, op-eds, and other thought leadership initiatives.  She previously served as Special Assistant for Communications to then-Harvard Law School Dean (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan and Senior Communications Advisor to the Dean at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  

As a senior facilitator for The OpEd Project, she has led programs in the U.S. and around the world for institutions that include Harvard University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and many others.

Her own work has appeared in many print and online publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Psychology Today, and she is the author of two suspense novels — Equivocal Death, a People magazine Page Turner of the Week, and The Anniversary, both published in hardcover by Little, Brown and in paperback by Warner Books.

Amy began her career at The Wilson Quarterly, where she served as an assistant editor. She went on to work as a newspaper reporter in Tennessee and Mississippi and later for Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL). There, she designed and served as founding director of The Mississippi Teacher Corps, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.

She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe with an A.B. in History and Literature and cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she earned her J.D. 

Please join me in welcoming Amy to the Brown community.

Sincerely,

Richard M. Locke

Provost