Bonnie Thornton Dill

Bonnie Thornton Dill is Professor Emerita of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Dean Emerita of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland. She served as Chair of WGSS for eight years. During her eleven-year tenure as dean, she increased faculty diversity, led development and launch of the campus-wide Arts for All initiative; increased external support for research and scholarship by 50%, raised $80 Million in gifts, and introduced an integrated career-curriculum program for student learning. Her pioneering research on the intersections of race and gender led to the publication of three books and numerous articles and inspired her to found two nationally renowned research centers that developed and disseminated the scholarship known as intersectionality. 

She has served as Vice President of the American Sociological Association, President of the National Women’s Studies Association, chair of the Advisory Board of Scholars for Ms. Magazine and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Feminist Majority Foundation. Currently she is co-principal investigator on two Mellon Foundation funded projects: “Breaking the M.O.L.D." a leadership development initiative for historically underrepresented arts and humanities faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and Morgan State University and HuMetricsHSS, a national initiative that creates and supports values-enacted frameworks for understanding, evaluating and nurturing scholarly life. She has received many awards, most recently, the 2025 UMD President’s Medal, “the highest honor bestowed upon a member of the university community.”