Dr. Tamara Jhashi Named Senior Vice President and Provost
After an extensive national search, NJCU announces the appointment of Dr. Tamara Jhashi as NJCU’s Senior Vice President and Provost. Dr. Jhashi’s academic credentials and longstanding commitment to the values and virtues central to NJCU’s mission propelled her to the top of a talented candidate pool.
An academic leader, committed to transforming lives through access to academic excellence and a champion of faculty and students, Dr. Jhashi comes to NJCU from Mercy College in New York, where, as the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, she led the academic mission of the Departments of Communication and the Arts; Humanities; Literature and Language; and Mathematics and Computer Science.
Serving the College for four years, her initiatives included establishing an annual theme in the School of Liberal Arts fusing curricular and co-curricular experiences to build a sense of community; leading the redesign of gateway Math and English courses to improve student success; founding an Advisory Board for the technology programs in the School; adding a graduate program in computer science; increasing high-impact practices; and hiring a third of the core School faculty.
Prior to Mercy College, Dr. Jhashi spent 18 years at Oakland University, a public regional comprehensive institution of 20,000 students in the Detroit metropolitan area. Here she served in key academic leadership roles, including Associate Provost in the Office of Academic Affairs, where she provided oversight to the professional Schools, managed the functions of the University Senate, and provided strategic direction to campus internationalization. And, as Acting Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, where she provided leadership to sixteen departments and 300 full-time faculty. Dr. Jhashi was a tenured faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History.
She served in multiple capacities in the department, contributing to a number of curricular reforms, leading committees, and advising students in thesis work. In addition, she curated two art exhibitions at the University Art Gallery. She also served as an ACE Fellow, class of 2013-2014, where she studied the role and value of the liberal arts.
She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Indiana University, with a focus on European modernism and specialization in early twentieth century Russian art. Her research area is Russian art of the 1910s, studying the specific contributions made by figurative painters of the avant-garde. Dr. Jhashi has taught widely on nineteenth and twentieth century American and European art as well as on Russian art and culture. She continues her research interests on the work of the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.
Dr. Jhashi will begin her tenure at NJCU on June 3, 2019.