Jason Koski/University Photography

Laura Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English.

Provost Kent Fuchs announced June 11 that English Professor Laura Brown has been appointed vice provost for undergraduate education.

Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English, will succeed Michele Moody-Adams, July 1. She joined the Cornell faculty in 1981 and is a former department chair and director of the graduate program. She has twice received the faculty fellowship from Cornell's Society for the Humanities and has also been a Regents fellow at the University of California.

"Laura has a broad range of experience to offer," Fuchs said. "She's taught in the First-Year Writing Seminar Program for many years and has a commitment to teaching excellence. She also offers a long history of experience with a number of leadership positions, including participation in the Faculty Senate. She has demonstrated excellence in all of her work, and she brings a lot to the table."

Brown's new charge is to provide for the highest quality academic experience for undergraduates. The most immediate item on her agenda is to oversee activities associated with the 2009 New Student Reading Project, in which all incoming students will read John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath." Also in August, the Flora Rose House -- the fifth and final residential house in Cornell's West Campus House System -- will open for residents.

"I'll be eager to continue support for West Campus," Brown said, "and to look for creative ways of extending to other parts of the campus the kind of living and learning academic programming that has been successful there."

Brown is especially committed to providing her fellow faculty members with instructional support: concrete ways to develop and extend their teaching skills, in the classroom or the lab or through independent research projects, she said. "We have excellent programs that encourage and reward strong teaching, and I'd like to extend and integrate those activities."

She also plans to advocate for and facilitate students' learning experiences, addressing issues from class size and mentoring to opportunities for fieldwork, service or study abroad, she said.

"And of course I'll have a role in several of our programs that are designed to support the academic success of underrepresented populations on campus. I'll be committed to maintaining the strength of those activities, but also alert to ways in which we can improve or augment them," she said.

A widely known scholar and critic of the English 18th century, Brown has published on such writers as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe. She studies the history of the literary representation of animals, the role of women in literature, the relationship between culture and history, the emergence of imperialist thought, and the effects of ideas of racial difference. She is the author of six books.

Brown earned her B.A. in English with highest honors at Stanford University (1971) and her Ph.D. in English at University of California- Berkeley (1977).