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ʻSTABILITAS ET FIDESʼ | ESTABLISHED OCT. 3, 1911 e English department has been Raitt’s home at the College since she arrived as a tenured professor in 2000. Raitt has studied leading literary women like Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair for her entire career and was the director of the Women’s Studies Program at the College from 2004 to 2008. Raitt wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West.

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“ e course I’ve taught most regularly recently is Lesbian Fictions,” Raitt said. “I teach that in preference to Virginia Woolf … not because Virginia Woolf isn’t popular but because there is such a demand on this campus for courses on LGBTQ topics and for safe spaces where people can explore those experiences.”

As dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, it is part of Raitt’s job to stay in tune with the demand for certain courses and sections. Along this vein, Raitt says it is her goal to hire more faculty and a more diverse faculty to meet these student demands, working with Arts and Sciences Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Wanjiru Mbure to do so. Raitt also said that the Dean’s O ce will undertake a strategic visioning process for Arts and Sciences in the fall.

“I want the process to be faculty-led, but I’m assuming that one of the top priorities is going to be working on increasing the diversity of the faculty in every aspect,” Raitt said. “And we’re lucky that we have great partnership from the president’s o ce and the provost’s o ce and the chief diversity o cer in achieving that goal.” roughout her time at the College, Raitt has shown a commitment to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion among faculty. In 2015, she worked with the chief diversity o cer and provost of the College to give the rst presentation on diversity at a meeting of the College’s board of visitors. Furthermore, as president of the Faculty Assembly, Raitt passed a resolution in 2013 that asked the state to provide bene ts for same-sex partners of College employees while also reaching out to other universities across Virginia to do the same. Raitt also successfully campaigned to change the Faculty Assembly’s by-laws to allow for non-tenured faculty representation.

In addition to increasing and diversifying Arts and Sciences faculty, Raitt’s goals as dean include making processes of registration and petitioning within the College more e cient. Furthermore, one of the dean’s most important initiatives currently revolves around restructuring Arts and Sciences to bene t student education and faculty research, particularly sparked by the conversation of a potential school for computing, data and applied science.

“To me, that conversation needs to be folded into a much broader conversation about the future of Arts and Sciences and revisioning it– building the strategic plan such that we can showcase all of our units and not just a few of them and give all of our units the support they need and not just a few of them,” Raitt said.

Raitt proves just how passionate she is about supporting the faculty and students at the College with the sheer determination of her commute.

For 19 years, Raitt has been commuting to the City weekly from her home in Washington, D.C. She has two kids, Ellen and Jonathan, with her husband Peter Lurie, who is the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.