Dwight A. McBride

Academic Administrator and university president Dwight McBride was born on November 28, 1967 in Honea Path, South Carolina to Bettye and James McBride. He received his B.A. degree in English and his certificate in African American Studies in 1990 from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from The University of California, Los Angeles in 1993 and 1996 respectively.

After receiving his Ph.D. degree, McBride was hired as an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1999, he joined the University of Illinois at Chicago as an assistant professor of English and African American Studies. McBride became chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 2002. He remained in that role until 2007, when he returned to the University of Illinois at Chicago as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor of African American Studies, English, and Gender & Women’s Studies. In 2010, McBride returned to Northwestern University to serve as dean of the Graduate School, associate provost, and the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, & Performance Studies. In 2015, he served as the Mellon Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the American Antiquarian Society while establishing the James Baldwin Review. In 2017, McBride became the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African American Studies, and Distinguished Affiliated Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2020 to 2023, McBride served as the ninth and first African American president of The New School in New York City.

McBride is the author of James Baldwin Now, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony, and Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality. He also co-edited the books A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity by Lindon Barrett, and The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard.

McBride served on the board of the About Face Theatre Company in Chicago from 2002 to 2012 and on the Illinois Humanities Council from 2009 to 2017. That year, he joined the Advisory Council of Princeton University’s program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. He became a trustee of The Cooper Union in 2018, a director of Con Edison in 2021, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022.

In 2020, McBride was named one of the top 50 influential leaders in higher education in New York State by City & State.

Dwight McBride was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on May 11, 2023.