Louise Mirrer

Dr. Louise Mirrer is President and Chief Executive Officer of the New-York Historical Society. Until recently, she was Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at The City University of New York. Prior to that, she served as Vice Provost for Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she held joint appointments as Professor in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature. Before her appointment at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Mirrer was a member of the faculty at Fordham University in New York and Chair of Fordham’s Division of Humanities. Dr. Mirrer has also been visiting professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. Dr. Mirrer continues to serve on committees of the Modern Language Association and International Association of Hispanists, and on the Visiting Advisors Board of the Salzburg Seminar, the College Board, the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and the editorial boards of several publications in the areas of language and medieval studies. She has published widely on language, literature, medieval studies and women’s studies, both books and articles, in Spanish and English, and has delivered papers at scholarly meetings in the United States and abroad. Her most recent book is Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (University of Michigan Press, 1996), a “deconstruction” of the medieval Castilian canon using contemporary theories of gender and race. Dr. Mirrer holds a double Ph.D. in Spanish and Humanities and an MA in Spanish from Stanford University. She holds a Diploma in Linguistics from Cambridge University (England). Her baccalaureate is from the University of Pennsylvania where she graduated magna cum laude with Honors in Spanish. She is married and has three children.