Ben Vinson III Appointed as Inaugural Presidential Fellow

The National Humanities Center (NHC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Ben Vinson III as its inaugural Presidential Fellow. The Presidential Fellowship initiative was established by NHC president and director Blair LM Kelley to recognize the accomplishments of distinguished scholars and humanities leaders and invite them to participate in the robust intellectual life of the Center.

Vinson is a historian of Latin America and has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Commission; the National Humanities Center; the Social Science Research Council; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.

Vinson recently served as the 18th president of Howard University. As president, he was tasked with inspiring, innovating, and strategically leading the entire Howard community. Before his appointment at Howard, he was provost and executive vice president at Case Western Reserve University. There, Vinson spearheaded the university’s “Think Big” strategic planning initiative, and was also co-principal investigator of the Humanities in Leadership Learning Series (HILLS) program.

He also served on the faculties of Barnard College and Penn State University before joining Johns Hopkins University as a professor of history and founding director of its Center for Africana Studies. At Johns Hopkins, he served as vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies and graduate education before becoming dean of George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Vinson is a member of the board of the National Humanities Center, serving as chairman from 2018 until 2023. He is also a member of the board of the National Humanities Alliance. He has served on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and in leadership positions for the Academy of Arts and Science’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Leadership, the American Historical Association, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Association of American Universities’ Advisory Board for Racial Equity in Higher Education.