After serving as interim president since August 2019, S. Georgia Nugent has been appointed to serve as Illinois Wesleyan University’s 20th president by the Board of Trustees. Nugent is president emerita (2003-2013) of Kenyon College, OH and served as interim president at The College of Wooster, 2015-16.

A widely published scholar of the classics and of higher education, Nugent earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a doctorate from Cornell University. At Princeton she was assistant to the president, associate provost, and dean of the Center for Teaching and Learning. She was professor of classics at Princeton and Brown universities and also taught on the classics faculties of Cornell, Swarthmore College and Kenyon.

Dr. Nugent is the first woman to officially hold the presidency at IWU. There have been two previous interim presidents: Wendell Hess, 1988-89 and Janet McNew, 2003-04.