Virginia Union University’s Board of Trustees has named Dr. Corey D. B. Walker as vice president and dean of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology. Dr. Walker will succeed senior vice president and dean Dr. John W. Kinney, effective July 1, 2017. Dr. Kinney is stepping down as dean after 27 years of service and will remain as a distinguished professor of theology at the University’s Graduate School of Theology.
Dr. Walker brings a wealth of academic experience to Virginia Union. He is currently Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business, and Education and John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston-Salem State University. As dean, he provides academic leadership for 19 academic departments that enroll more than 3,500 students in courses each year, over 50 undergraduate majors and minors, three master’s level graduate programs, four academic centers, the Diggs Art Gallery, the Office of International Programs, and more than 200 full-time faculty members.
Prior to his appointment at Winston-Salem State University, Dr. Walker was a tenured faculty member and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. He also served as a faculty member in the department of Religious Studies and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Dr. Walker was the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge established by the Carter G. Woodson Institute, with support from the Ford Foundation, as the only research center in the country dedicated to new and innovative research related to the concept of local knowledge. He also served as a visiting professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena in Germany.
Dr. Walker has published broadly in the areas of African American religion and philosophy, critical theory, and cultural theory and studies and has lectured before academic audiences in the United States, the Caribbean and South America, Europe, and Africa. He has served as Book Review Editor and as an Associate Editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, generally considered the top academic journal in the field.
Dr. Walker earned his Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary, master’s degrees from Harvard University, Brown University, and Virginia Union University, and bachelor’s degree from Norfolk State University.
Vanessa Moody Coombs, J.D.
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