Three Women Recently Appointed to Provost Positions

Daphne Lamothe has been appointed provost and dean of faculty at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She will assume her new position on July 1.

Dr. Lamothe is a professor of Africana studies who has been with the college since 2004. Over the past two decades, she has held various academic and administrative roles including chair of the Africana studies department and co-chair of the Admission Policy Study Group. As an academic, Dr. Lamothe focuses on literary and cultural representations of Black consciousness formed by migratory and transnational experiences. She has written numerous scholarly publications including Black Time and the Aesthetic Possibility of Objects (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) and Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Dr. Lamothe holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Paige Turner has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Aurora University in Illinois. She will take on her new duties on July 1.

Currently, Dr. Turner serves as dean of the College of Communication, Information, and Media at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Prior to her present position, she served as executive director for the National Communication Association, associate dean at Webster University in Missouri, and associate vice president at Saint Louis University in Missouri. Her scholarly background has focused on organizational communication, specifically on topics of internationalization, organizational socialization, customer satisfaction, gender, midwifery and birth, breastfeeding, and the body.

Dr. Turner is a graduate of the University of Oregon where she double-majored in rhetoric and marketing. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in organizational communication from Purdue University in Indiana.

Tia Minnis has been appointed provost and vice president for academic affairs at Virginia State University. She has served as interim provost for the past year.

Dr. Minnis joined the administration at Virginia State University in 2017 as associate vice provost for academic affairs and executive director for institutional effectiveness. She was promoted to vice provost for academic success, planning, and institutional effectiveness four years later. Prior to her tenure with Virginia State University, she held numerous leadership roles with Clark Atlanta University including executive director of assessment and effectiveness. She previously held positions with Georgia Southern University and the University of Georgia.

Dr. Minnis completed her undergraduate education at Savannah State University in Georgia where she studied business and computer information systems. She holds an MBA and a master’s degree in technology from Georgia Southern University, as well as a doctorate in educational leadership from Clark Atlanta University.