Dr. Powell Watts Joins ADVANCE Center as Faculty Director

The Office of the Provost and the Lehigh ADVANCE Center announce that Professor Stephanie Powell Watts will join the Lehigh ADVANCE Center as a Faculty Director starting January 1, 2025, for a three-year appointment.

The mission of the Lehigh ADVANCE Center is to support faculty diversity, inclusion, equity, and success across all disciplines through institutional transformation. Dr. Powell Watts, of the Department of English, joins Dr. Joan Ramage, Associate Professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences, alongside Dr. Marci Levine to support Lehigh’s initiatives to attract and retain diverse faculty. Together they will elevate training tools, research questions, and collaborations that align with the goals of a Lehigh for Everyone. 

Dr. Powell Watts, Professor of English, the Robert D. Rodale Chair in Writing and the Director of Lehigh’s Creative Writing Program, is the author of the novel No One is Coming to Save Us, winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction.  Her story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need, is a recipient of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.  Her work has appeared in the Best American Essays, the New York Times, BBC International, and many other venues.  Dr. Powell Watts has served at Lehigh as a mentor and advisor for many years. 

Her focus in this leadership role with the ADVANCE team will be on faculty retention and success.  Her particular emphasis will be on the mentoring, advancement, tenure, and promotion of faculty of color.  She will bring to ADVANCE her steady insistence that everyone's unique expression has value and beauty and will seek to ‘unmute people’s voices’ so they are not only heard, but ring out. She will build off her track record of creating university-wide, nationally recognized programs (Notations, Creative Writing Program) and her support of faculty colleagues to enhance the University’s evidence-based impact and assessment of current and new programs and/or policies. ADVANCE Center and Lehigh will benefit from Dr. Powell Watts’ approach to raising faculty stories to further our transformation across all disciplines.

The ADVANCE Center will continue to collaborate with the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, a range of senior leaders, the Faculty Senate, the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity and other campus partners to guide, implement, and investigate evidence-based strategies and programs. This structure of the Center is also strategic in that it supports leadership development and succession planning, retains a core of attention on women in STEM, while innovating and iterating on the programs, scholarship of practice, discovery, and policy which sustainably cement the Center’s efforts as part of the fabric of Lehigh University. The directors welcome input from the campus community on needs and activities.

Much about ADVANCE, its history, its ongoing work to support women in STEM and other underrepresented faculty, and the capacity to inform equity-minded policy and decisions are available online. Current initiatives touch on critical policies and processes that promote faculty equity, inclusion, and success in areas such as Faculty Recruitment & Onboarding, Faculty Retention, Climate & Community, Mentoring, Professional Development, Equitable Evaluation, Tenure and Promotion, Service and Workload Equity, and the Advancing Future Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Program. ADVANCE regularly attends and presents at national diversity & inclusion conferences and is a vibrant member of the national ADVANCE Implementation Mentors Network.