Wanda Pillow Awarded Rank of Distinguished Professor

Wanda Pillow is not interested in being simplified into a catharsis story—she is here for the students, the utter joy of scholarly pursuits, and systems level positive change. In the late 1990s when Pillow entered the academy as a doctoral student, the landscape was significantly different than today. “I had been at interviews and had people ask, ‘Why don’t you write about yourself?’ They were more interested in, ‘Tell us about being underprivileged, Wanda,’ and that made me determined to establish myself as a scholar. I am a theorist. I am a methodologist. I am an excellent teacher. I am invested in students,” she says. 

There’s no denying that Pillow has built an impactful career as a feminist scholar along those same lines. This spring she has been awarded the rank of Distinguished Professor, the highest academic honor conferred by the university, in recognition of exemplary scholarship on national and international stages and a sustained dedication to teaching and mentorship. 

Pillow, a professor of gender studies in the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies, also serves as dean of the College of Humanities. Reflecting on the early years of her academic journey as a first-generation graduate student, she laughs, “I was so thrilled to be a student and get paid the pittance that I got paid, because I just thought, ‘I’m getting paid to study!’ and that seemed miraculous.” 

Pillow credits her successful career, in part, to the excellent mentors she has found at institutions along the way—Nancy Cantor, currently President of Hunter College, James D. Anderson, Gutgsell Professor and dean emeritus at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Patti Lather, professor emerita at The Ohio State University, in particular. Watching them, she learned how to set a successful strategy within both research and educational leadership contexts and follow through with integrity. She says, “I have had excellent and life changing role models and examples of positive, impactful leadership—and from each I learned how to be in academia, how to excel, how to be a catalyst for positive change, and how to do so with an ethics of care.” 

“Dr. Pillow is an exceptional mentor for both undergraduate and graduate students across multiple disciplines. Over many years, students have praised her supportive style which encourages them to push their research further,” says Ella Myers, chair of the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies. “Dr. Pillow has taken on major leadership roles at the U, where she has served as Chair of the Division of Gender Studies, Dean of School of Cultural & Social Transformation, and now Dean of the College of Humanities. During challenging times, she has dedicated herself to strengthening vital programs that enrich the campus community.” 

Pillow’s body of work includes long-term, deep archival projects sprinkled throughout with compelling theoretical and methodological papers. As she describes it, “I'm always someone who has a primary research project going on while I'm writing theoretical and mythological papers. That's been a pathway that works well for me. 
My primary research is archival; so it gets me into the archives, which is a break sometimes from the other theory and methodology, but then the theory and methodology are also linked, right? Not only to my hands-on policy work, but to what I've seen, how I interact with archives.” 

The central themes tying together Pillow’s archival, theoretical, and methodological work are questions of epistemology: how we know what we know, and what is at stake in the ways we are knowing? Tracing all the way back to her early research based on ethnographic work with teen mothers in public schools, through her policy work with the state of Ohio, the city of New York, and the National Women’s Law Center, and into the colleges of education and humanities where she eventually found her academic home, the consistent questioning of what counts as knowledge and who gets to decide—and to what effect—serves as Pillow’s intellectual north star. 

Her work has been recognized by several fellowships from the Mellon Foundation as well as prestigious fellowships from the Huntington Library, the National Humanities Center, and the Newberry Library. Pillow has received the University of Utah Distinguished Mentor Award as well as a Faculty Fellows Award numerous additional awards from colleges and academic centers throughout the United States. She has delivered dozens of invited lectures and presentations, served on editorial boards and as editor for several journals, and mentored over 100 graduate students throughout her career.

UK scholar and clinical practitioner Gail Simons outlines the impact of Pillow’s scholarship succinctly: “Professor Pillow’s writing demonstrates rigour and aesthetic. She develops critical theory, forges connections between complex ideas, develops a coherent relationship between content and form, while creating an accessible text with practical suggestions for readers. Together these activities evidence an extraordinary quality of academic commitment, craft and artistry.”

Please join us in congratulating Dean Pillow on this high honor!