Provost & Senior Vice President Wendi S. Williams, Ph.D.

Psychologist, advocate, and educator, Dr. Wendi Williams applies her work at the intersection of education and psychology to her scholarship and leadership praxis. Williams completed undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis where she majored in psychology and minored in African and African American Studies. She completed graduate study at Pepperdine University (MA in Psychology) and Georgia State University, where she earned a doctorate in counseling psychology, with an emphasis in multicultural psychology and family systems.

In a career spanning two decades, Williams’ work delves into the contours of Black women’s and girls’ inner lives, leveraging deep knowledge of their interiority as source content for the development of culturally-responsive educational and psychological interventions. Applying critical lenses of liberation psychology and Womanist, Black, and Intersectional feminist theoretical frames with an equity-centered systems power analysis, Williams develops and implements educational, wellness, and leadership intervention programming with individuals, groups, and organizations. Her work attends to the individual and organizational transformation required to foment the optimal growth and development of diverse women and girls, while attending to the organizational and societal systems-level change required for sustainable equity practice.

As a scholar-practitioner, Dr. Williams’ research and practice inform her leadership practice in higher education contexts. Most recently, in her role as Dean of the School of Education at Mills College, and prior as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Bank Street College, Graduate School of Education, she utilized her role to cultivate equitable contexts for student, staff, and faculty development while attending to structural and cultural change to support important curricular and program development. Prior to these roles she provided academic leadership as program coordinator and department chair for the Counseling and School Psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY where she also served as Vice President of the University Faculty Senate and Representative of the School of Education on the university’s Union Executive Committee.

Details, and offers vignettes to illustrate, how patriarchy and white supremacy have restricted Black women at work, both historically and currently.

In Black Women at Work, Wendi S. Williams moves the conversation beyond the stubborn audacity of inequity, focusing instead on the powerful history and example of Black women’s labor and refusal practices and on the potent role that choice and voice can play in dismantling seemingly impenetrable systems of unfairness. Through the interweaving of personal narratives and social media reflections, Williams crafts a larger narrative of recovery and refusal that articulates a liberatory path toward recovery and reclamation through refusal-a path that will ultimately help to bring us all closer to freedom.

Dr. Williams completed undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis where she majored in psychology and minored in African and African American Studies. She completed graduate study at Pepperdine University (MA in Psychology) and Georgia State University, where she earned a doctorate in counseling psychology, with an emphasis in multicultural psychology and family systems.

Fielding Provost Dr. Wendi S. Williams Delivers Keynote at APA 2023