Jonathan Scott Holloway

Jonathan Holloway, a U.S. historian, is the President & CEO of the Henry R. Luce Foundation. Previously, he served as the president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2020-2025). Prior to accepting the presidency of Rutgers, Dr. Holloway was provost of Northwestern University from 2017 to 2020 and a member of the faculty of Yale University from 1999 to 2017. At Yale, he served as Dean of Yale College and the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies. Holloway’s scholarly work specializes in post-emancipation U.S. history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, February 2021) as well as Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013), the latter two published by the University of North Carolina Press. He edited Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (New York University Press, 2005) and coedited Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century (Notre Dame University Press, 2007). He wrote the introduction for the 2015 edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (Yale University Press) and Kelly Miller’s Race Adjustment (Columbia Global Reports, 2025). He is working on a new book, A History of Absence: Race and the Making of the Modern World. He serves on boards of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Institute of International Education, and the Academic Leadership Institute.