Katie Conboy, Ph.D.

Finance & Investment Committee

President
Saint Mary’s College
Notre Dame, IN

“As the president of a women’s college that is committed to the advancement of women across the lifecycle, I am thrilled to serve on the Board of HERS. For over a half-century, HERS has sponsored cutting-edge leadership development programs for women who want to make a difference in higher education, and it is a privilege to be a part of this mission.”

Dr. Katie Conboy began as the 14th president of Saint Mary’s College on June 1, 2020. She has more than three decades of experience in Catholic higher education, the liberal arts, and women’s colleges. An imaginative and seasoned leader, she encourages collaboration across the College, inviting the community to explore new approaches to every endeavor and challenging students to be creatively curious about how their knowledge, skills, values, and actions can contribute to the greater good. Early in her presidency, she led a participatory process to create a new strategic plan, which focuses on empowering leaders, enriching our community, and enhancing the College’s future. Prior to Saint Mary’s, Conboy was provost and senior vice president at Simmons University, a women’s college in Boston. There, she led the process to redesign the academic structure of the university, creating four new interdisciplinary colleges and hiring four new deans for those colleges. Before that, she spent 26 years at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, where she served first as a professor of English literature, then as the College’s first Provost. As a faculty member, Conboy was an award-winning teacher and an active scholar. She co-edited the book Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1997), and is the author of many scholarly articles on British and American fiction, Irish literature and feminist theory. As an administrator, she continues to be a life-long learner, completing the Advanced Management Program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the Nonprofit Financial Stewardship Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Conboy earned her doctoral degree in English literature from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, and her undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas in 1981.