Allison Pease is Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. In this role she is the chief academic officer, providing leadership for John Jay’s academic programs, faculty, and student academic success. The Office of the Provost is committed to advancing the college’s strategic goals: supporting students in their John Jay journeys, advancing and supporting justice education, promoting equity, diversity and inclusion, and institutional effectiveness.
Before serving as Interim Provost, Dr. Pease served as Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness, Associate to the Provost for Faculty, Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Chair of English, and Director of Gender Studies. She is passionate about John Jay as a place of opportunity and transformation for students, faculty, and staff. Among her accomplishments at John Jay she led the creation of the English B.A. and the Gender Studies B.A., established sophomore advising in the majors, helped create CUNY’s first ACE program at John Jay, established the college’s Teaching and Learning Center, co-authored the 2019 Vision for Undergraduate Student Success, led the 2020-2025 Strategic Planning process, co-lead the initiative to create the Seven Principles for a Culturally Responsive, Inclusive and Anti-Racist Curriculum, and is currently leading John Jay’s Middle States reaccreditation process.
Interim Provost Pease earned her Ph.D. from New York University and joined John Jay in 1998. She holds the rank of Professor of English. She is a scholar of modernist literature and culture (1870-1940) and the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge UP, 2000), Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (Cambridge UP, 2012), the coauthor of Modernism, Sex, and Gender (Bloomsbury 2018) and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse (Cambridge UP, 2014). Her body of work questions the center from the margins whether through the lens of how the new genre of written pornography in the eighteenth-century challenged burgeoning aesthetic theories, and therefore elite class values; how women's boredom in the twentieth-century challenged the patriarchal status quo; or how theories of marginalized sexual and gender identities have reshaped modernist studies.