Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement
Adjunct Associate Professor of the Practice in the Program in Education
As a professional certified coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF), Maria Wisdom is committed to helping Duke faculty flourish as researchers, educators, mentors and leaders. She offers semester-long group coaching programs for both early and midcareer faculty, from all disciplines and all schools at Duke. She also provides 1:1 coaching to faculty at critical transition points of their careers, and is happy to talk with faculty on any topic related to their professional trajectories. In addition, Dr. Wisdom leads workshops on mentoring for all faculty who would like to enhance or improve their mentorship of junior researchers, scholars and/or colleagues. Dr. Wisdom’s reflections on mentorship, coaching and faculty life show up occasionally in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Dr. Wisdom holds a Ph.D. in English literature (Victorian studies) from Indiana University, and was an assistant/associate professor of English at Columbia College in South Carolina for over a decade. She is the author of “Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home” and a recipient of two research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her articles on women writers and religion have appeared in Studies in the Novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature and other peer-reviewed journals. In 2012, she pivoted to full-time administrative work, stepping into the position of executive director at the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. In that role, she oversaw a suite of scholarly and leadership resources for faculty development, and helped create customized programming for both early and midcareer faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences.