Susan L. Carlson
Associate Provost for Faculty Advancement and Diversity
1550 Beardshear
Ames, IA 50011
Phone: 515-294-9556
Email:
Professional Profile
Dr. Carlson was appointed Associate Provost in July 2001. She became Associate Provost for Faculty Advancement and Diversity in 2004. She also served as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost from June to December 2006. Dr. Carlson joined the English Department at Iowa State in 1980, after completing her M. A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Oregon and her B. A. at the University of Iowa.
Administrative Activities
As Associate Provost, Dr. Carlson has led efforts to enhance the academic environment for Iowa State faculty. Primary accomplishments include new policies for promotion and tenure, new programs for flexible faculty careers and partner accommodation, and new approaches to part-time appointments for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty. She currently serves as the PI for an NSF-funded ADVANCE Program to increase the diversity of STEM faculty. She also coordinates faculty recruitment and retention, mentoring and new faculty orientation, leadership training for department chairs, and university awards. She chairs the Advisory Committee on Diversity Program Planning and Coordination, the body charged with ensuring a vigorous and diverse institutional community. She is responsible for the work of the University Committee on Women, the Women's Leadership Consortium, the Keeping our Faculties of Color Leadership Team, the Council of College Diversity Committee Chairs, the Diversity Grants Program, the Martin Luther King Jr. Planning Committee, and the Iowa Women's Leadership Summit. She is regularly involved in college-level planning, she has managed the searches for three deans, and she led the effort to combine the Colleges of Education and Family and Consumer Sciences into the new College of Human Sciences. She has also coordinated strategic planning for faculty and diversity issues.
She is the founding President of the Iowa Network for Women in Higher Education and serves on the national board of directors for the Office of Women in Higher Education, a division of the American Council on Education.
Academic Accomplishments
Dr. Carlson has taught courses from first-year composition to graduate seminars in Shakespeare, from drama and literary theory to the introduction to Women's Studies. She co-developed a study abroad course in London as well as an interdisciplinary learning community. As Associate Provost, she has promoted numerous initiatives that advance the scholarship of teaching and learning, both at Iowa State and nationally.
Her research includes two books on British theatre: Women in Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition and Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners. She has written numerous articles on playwrights from the Renaissance to the present. Her current research is focused on suffrage playwrights in Edwardian London.
