Laura Rosenbury, a prominent legal scholar and academic administrator who for the past eight years has served as the University of Florida’s law dean, was recently named president of Barnard College. She will assume her new role on July 1.
Rosenbury, who graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School, is a legal theorist with expertise in family law, employment discrimination, reproductive rights, children’s rights, and sexual harassment and abuse. The first woman to lead Florida’s Levin College of Law on a permanent basis, she is the coauthor of the textbook Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials and has also taught at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Washington University in St. Louis.
At Barnard, Rosenbury will succeed Sian Leah Beilock, who is stepping down to become Dartmouth College’s first woman president.
Says Rosenbury: “I grew up in rural Indiana, and until my freshman year of college I had never even heard of women’s history. Higher education is where I learned to see the world in a new way and was given the space to identify where my passions lie. It’s incredibly special to be joining a community devoted specifically to helping the next generation of women do the same.”
