Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Brief Biography of Elaine Tuttle Hansen

Elaine Tuttle Hansen became president of Bates College on July 1, 2002, the seventh president of the College since its founding in 1855. Most recently Hansen served as provost at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, a liberal arts college of 1,100 students located in suburban Philadelphia. Hansen earned her A.B. at Mount Holyoke College, her M.A. at the University of Minnesota, and her Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

Before coming to Haverford in 1980, she was an associate editor of the Middle English Dictionary at the University of Michigan and taught at Hamilton College. She has taught a wide variety of courses in Middle English literature and in contemporary women’s writing and feminist theory, as well as introductory linguistics and first-year writing seminars. Before being named Provost at Haverford, she served as Chair of the English Department and as Coordinator of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Concentration in Feminist and Gender Studies. She was also awarded the Lindbach Teaching Prize.

The recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and of Whitehead and Mellon Faculty Development funds, Hansen has published numerous literary critical articles and reviews and three books: Reading Wisdom in Old English Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 1988); Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (University of California Press, 1992); and Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood (University of California Press, 1997). She is a member and past President of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and a member of the Modern Language Association, where she has served on the Executive Committee of the Chaucer division, the Delegate Assembly, and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities.