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Annual VWHE Conference 2011 Keynote Speaker "Opening the Doors of Opportunity Through Leaps of Faith"
At the age of 18, immediately following high school, she began work in the banking industry. Through hard work and perseverance, she achieved professional success, despite the fact that she had not yet obtained a college degree. In the 1960s she became the first Black woman Vice President and Chief Operating Office at the Independence bank of Chicago. In the 1970s, she worked as the Budget and Planning Officer and Manager of three Citibank branches in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. After 20 years, she left her banking career behind, and began her pursuit of higher education. Between 1981 and 1991, she completed her undergraduate work at Brown University, where she majored in Social Cultural Anthropology and graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in Anthropology. She went on to earn a PhD in Social Cultural Anthropology from Yale University. She completed her graduate field work in Dominica, West Indies. Her dissertation titled “Behind God’s Back: The Everyday Lives of Men and Women in Dominica” was a study of economic and political adaptations from colonial rule and life to a newly independent nation. From 1991-1999 she worked at Brown University as the Associate Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. As a visiting scholar in 1995 she served for a year as Associate Dean of the College at Bennington College in Vermont. Dr. English recently retired from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, where she served as the Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, from 1999-2010. The program, with a portfolio of 44 colleges and universities in the U.S. and South Africa, is charged with increasing the number of minority students continuing on for doctoral degrees in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The program’s success rate has been high. The program has had over 3,000 undergraduate students participating and over 75% continuing on for graduate and professional degrees. Diversity Initiatives within the program provides graduate students and post-graduates in Alaska, Atlanta, Hawaii, New Mexico, New York and South Africa with dissertation research and advanced research grants. Dr. English served as the Senior Advisor to the Mellon Foundation from 2009-2010, and during her tenure as the Director; she made over $85 million in grants.
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