Sophia Howlett, PhD
Dr. Sophia Howlett holds a PhD in European Renaissance Philosophy and Literature from York University in the UK, and an MA in English from Cambridge University. She has taught, researched, and written in philosophy, literature, and comparative and international higher education policy as a professor and dean in the UK, Hungary, and the United States.
She was an Open Society Institute International Policy Fellow and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in comparative higher education. She has held visiting professorships in Renaissance Studies in Ukraine and Russia, and was a consultant, trainer, speaker and evaluator for Open Society Foundations, Amideast, the Institute of International Education, and UNESCO, among others.
She has worked at the governmental level to promote higher education change with a particular focus on the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. She has been a board chair or member of a variety of international NGOs specializing in international higher education. At Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, Dr. Howlett founded a program focusing on international higher education development for emerging democracies. She increased access to graduate education for Romanies; oversaw the creation of the first LGBTQ network for eastern Europe, and developed faculty support programming recognized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Prior to SIT, she was associate vice president for Academic Affairs at Kean University in New Jersey.
Since coming to SIT, Dr Howlett has chaired the Certification Committee for the Vermont Higher Education Council (VHEC), served on the Executive Committee of both VHEC and the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges, led evaluation teams for the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE), and has been appointed to the Vermont delegation of the New England Board of Higher Education.
Dr. Howlett is a former editorial board member of the European Journal of Higher Education. She is the author of two books on Renaissance philosophy, Marsilio Ficino and His World, published in 2016, and Re-evaluating Pico: Aristotelianism, Kabbalism, and Platonism in the Philosophy of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, published in 2020.
Education
- PhD, University of York
- MA, Cambridge University
