Alisha Knight

Alisha Knight was appointed Acting Chief Diversity Officer and Special Advisor to the Executive Vice Provost in June 2025. In this role, she serves as an advisor, thought partner, and collaborator across the university to foster an inclusive, equitable, and pluralistic environment for all Johns Hopkins University affiliates. Dr. Knight came to the university in 2024 as the inaugural Executive Director of Faculty Diversity. In that role she supported the Fannie Gaston-Johannson Faculty of Excellence Program and other key initiatives. Dr. Knight previously served as the Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at Washington College where she helped shape and operationalize the college’s priorities to attract, recruit, and retain diverse faculty, librarians, and Academic Affairs staff. She also worked collaboratively to develop and implement the college’s strategic diversity plan.

Dr. Knight is an award-winning English professor with more than 20 years of higher education teaching experience. Prior to earning the rank of full professor at Washington College in 2021, she received the 2020 Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2020 Cromwell Award for Innovation in Teaching. Her scholarship focuses on African American literature and print culture, specifically African American book publishing practices at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream (University of Tennessee Press 2012) and co-editor, with John Cullen Gruesser, of a scholarly edition of Hagar’s Daughter (Broadview Press 2020). Her most recent work, “Editing Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter for Our Times,” appears in American Periodicals (2024). She earned her B.A. in English (summa cum laude) at Spelman College and her Ph.D. in English (Phi Beta Kappa) at Drew University.