Maria LaMonaca Wisdom is the the Director of Graduate Student Advising and Engagement for the Humanities at Duke University. She received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Indiana University. After teaching at Valparaiso University as a Lilly postdoctoral fellow in the humanities, she worked as an assistant/associate professor of English at Columbia College in South Carolina. While at Columbia College, she was co-PI and co-director for a Lilly-funded faculty mentoring program, and her advising and mentoring work with students included a term as director of Columbia’s Washington Semester internship program.
Prior to arriving at Duke, Wisdom was the executive director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she oversaw scholarship and leadership development programs for humanities faculty. Wisdom’s commitment to individualized professional development for academics led her to complete an ICF-approved certificate program in professional coaching from North Carolina State University (August 2019).
Wisdom is the author of Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Ohio State University Press, 2008), and her articles on women, religion, and Victorian culture have appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals. Her scholarship has been supported by two awards from the NEH, and she has served as a reviewer/consultant for the NEH, the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program, Ohio State University Press, Wharton School of Business (MBA Writing Challenge), and several scholarly journals. Mostly recently, she has written articles on humanities graduate education for Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning (2018) and MLA Profession (forthcoming Fall 2019).
