Meet Henry S. Turner

On July 1, 2025, Henry S. Turner, PhD, was appointed as Interim Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. As interim EVPAA, Dr. Turner reports to President William Tate, forging strategies and developing initiatives to strengthen the academic enterprise at Rutgers. He serves as interim chief academic officer for the institution, leads all universitywide faculty advancement programs, and coordinates academic priorities across the central administrative offices and chancellor-led units. Dr. Turner has served as the inaugural Vice President for Academic Initiatives since 2020, guiding universitywide interdisciplinary strategic investment and faculty hiring, including strategic cluster hiring, and overseeing REACH, an interdisciplinary community engagement initiative on social determinants of health.

The EVPAA works closely with chancellors and provosts to voice a collective vision for academic accomplishment and public impact that distinguishes Rutgers as one of the oldest, finest, and most diverse public research universities in the nation. Among other key universitywide functions, the EVPAA stewards all academic policies and procedures, manages Rutgers’ tenure and promotion and academic program approval processes, and oversees the libraries, Rutgers Global, Institutional Research and Decision Support, enrollment management, disability services, student veterans’ services, and Rutgers University Press. The EVPAA also has oversight for the Office for Research, which combines key functions in research infrastructure, intellectual property, and grants administration universitywide.

Dr. Turner is Henry Rutgers Professor of English at Rutgers–New Brunswick, where he has taught since 2007. A scholar of Renaissance English literature, he is the author or editor of five books, over forty articles, essays, reviews, and interviews, and more than one hundred lectures, seminars, and talks at institutions across the world. His scholarship has made pioneering interdisciplinary contributions to the study of the theater of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, literature and intellectual history, including literary theory, rhetoric, and formalism, the history of science and technology, theatricality and performance, and the history of 16th- and 17th-century economics, law, and political thought. He is an award-winning graduate teacher and supervises graduate training in each of these academic areas, with former students teaching at institutions as varied as the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Connecticut, the University of Maryland, and Yale University. Other former students work in organizational consulting, community organizing, public schools, and help lead the Rutgers Writing Program. Three of his students have won or received honorable mention for the Shakespeare Association of America’s J. Leeds Barroll Prize, awarded to the best dissertation of the year in blind competition.

Dr. Turner has served on the editorial boards for Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Exemplaria, and the book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy” (Edinburgh University Press) and “Early Modern Cultural Studies” (Palgrave). With Mary Thomas Crane, PhD, (Boston College), he is series co-editor for Penn Studies in Literature and Science (Penn Press), which publishes ground-breaking work in literature and science from the medieval period to the 19th century. He has chaired the Executive Committee for the Modern Languages Association’s Division of Literature and Science, has served as a Rutgers campus representative to the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., been a member of the Consortium Executive Committee for the Newberry Library in Chicago, and served on the Steering Committee of the Leadership for a New Academy (LINA), a national leadership institute for institutional change piloted by the American Council of Learned Societies and funded by the Mellon Foundation. He has served as a peer reviewer for the Institute for Advanced Study, the Radcliffe Institute, the Folger Institute, the Huntington Library, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Research Council, and the American Academy in Berlin. His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and by a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, taken in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. With Jane Hwang Degenhardt, PhD, (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), he is currently co-writing a book entitled Shakespearean Cosmologies: Ethics, Ethics, Experience, a study that looks to ancient, early modern, and indigenous cosmological traditions as a way of understanding world-making in Shakespeare's plays and imagining alternatives to globalization and an anthropocentric future.

Prior to joining the Office of the EVPAA, Dr. Turner served as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities and Arts at Rutgers–New Brunswick from 2018-2020, charged with promoting innovative faculty research and advancement, growing extramural funding, and forging new interdisciplinary connections among the humanities, creative arts, humanistic social sciences, and STEM fields. He is a former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), a leading advanced interdisciplinary research institute in the humanities and social sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers–New Brunswick.