R. Owen Williams

Richard Owen Williams is an American historian and former businessman who was chosen to replace Charles L. Shearer as the president of Transylvania University on April 14, 2010. He assumed office on August 1, 2010.

Education and career

Williams earned an A.B. in philosophy from Dartmouth College and an M.A. in intellectual history from Cambridge University, before beginning a 24-year career on Wall Street as director of the government bond department at Salomon Brothers, executive director at Goldman Sachs, and chairman of Bear Stearns Asia. He spent more than a year living and working in Tokyo and three years living and working in Hong Kong.

Williams began to prepare himself for a career in academic administration by studying history and law at Yale University. He earned a master's of law from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in history, specializing in nineteenth-century American history, from Yale University.

He has been awarded the Raoul Berger Fellowship at Harvard Law School, the Samuel Golieb Fellowship at the New York University School of Law, the Fletcher Jones Fellowship at the Huntington Library, the Legal History Fellowship at Yale Law School, and the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship in history at Yale University.

Williams has published in several magazines, journals, and encyclopedias. He edited The Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition and was an articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. He is currently working with Harvard University Press on the publication of his dissertation, Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and the First Civil Rights Movement, 1857-1883.^[1]

References