S. Georgia Nugent

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S. Georgia Nugent is eighteenth president of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She is the first woman in Kenyon's history to hold this position.

Nugent previously served as Princeton University's dean for the Harold McGraw Jr. Center for Teaching and Learning.

She is a cum laude graduate of Princeton University, Class of 1973, the university's first coeducational class. She later became the first female graduate of Princeton to hold a full-time faculty appointment there.

Nugent earned a Ph.D. in classics from Cornell University. She began her teaching career as an instructor at Swarthmore College before returning to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1979. She went to Brown University in 1985, where the classics department appointed her associate professor. In 1992, she again answered the call of her alma mater, becoming assistant to the president of Princeton University, and later, associate provost. Georgia became dean of Princeton's McGraw Center in 2001, where she worked with a variety of programs and services for faculty and students to enhance teaching and learning at Princeton.

A widely published scholar of the classics, Nugent specializes in epic poetry and enjoys exploring the lives of maverick female characters. She has numerous articles and presentations to her credit.

Renowned as a teacher, Georgia received the Wriston Award for Excellence in Teaching during her tenure at Brown. Her desire to become a teacher was sparked by her mentor, Robert Hollander, a European literature professor at Princeton University, who believes that one of her greatest assets is her commitment to teaching and scholarship.

Her gifts as a professor were made known to a wider audience when the Teaching Company, of Arlington, Virginia, included her lectures in two sets of audio and video recordings, entitled "Great Books Curriculum—Classics" and "Thinking through Myth," in its SuperStar Teachers college lecture series.

Among Nugent's accomplishments at Princeton were initiatives to lead the university's distance-learning programs. In early 2000, she helped establish the Educational Technologies Center, which enables faculty members to use digital images and Web material for alumni distance education as well as for on-campus instruction. "A woman who leads largely male troops in instructional technology is an uncommon sight in higher education," reported the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2001. "But the role suits Nugent well."

Nugent is married to Thomas J. Scherer, an alumnus of Princeton and of Columbia Law School, who is general counsel of the financial services division with the global re-insurer Swiss Re in New York City.