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2025–2026 Lund-Gill Chair

Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, 2020), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Mere Wife (FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf. Her full cast musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: a Mythological Musical, came out from Audible in 2023. 

Headley delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023, and has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, among many others. In Fall 2025, she held the Rachel Rivers Coffey Distinguished Professorship in Creative Writing at Appalachian State University. Headley grew up in the high desert of Idaho on a survivalist sled dog ranch, where she spent summers plucking the winter coat from her father’s wolf.

About the Lund-Gill Chair 

The endowed Lund-Gill Chair was established in 2003 to recognize the extraordinary accomplishments of two Dominican Sisters, Candida Lund, OP, and Cyrille Gill, OP. The Lund-Gill Chair was created in order to bring to our campus individuals of the highest moral and intellectual reputation who can address themes and issues at the heart of the liberal arts and sciences and at the intersections of academia and society.

 

Former Lund-Gill Scholars

2024-2025: Craig A.Ford, Jr., PhD, assistant professor of theology and religious studies, St. Norbert College, DePere, Wisconsin.
2023-2024: Ada Cheng (SOC/ENG). Sociology researcher and professor and social justice advocate. 
2022-2023: Sandra Delgado, (THEA/ENG).  Writer and performer. 
2021-2022: Luis Argueta (Communication Arts and Sciences)—Guatemalan film-maker.
2020-2021: None (COVID).
2019–2020: Marion Weedermann, PhD, professor of mathematics at Dominican University
2018-2019; 2017–2018: Molly J. Giblin, PhD, instructor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis
2016–2017: Robert Calin-Jageman, PhD, professor of psychology and director of the neuroscience program, Dominican University.
2015–2016: Sr. M. Paul McCaughey, Archbishop of Chicago's Delegate for School Advancement and Advocacy.
2014–2015: Ana Castillo, internationally acclaimed creative writer, scholar, editor, and translator.
2013–2014: Tricia Rose, Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.
2012–2013: Christopher Kennedy, Chairman of Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises.
2011–2012: Eboo Patel, PhD, founder and the executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core. 
2010–2011: Chia-Feng Chang, PhD, Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence and expert in Chinese science and medicine. 
2009–2010: Father Richard Woods, OP, professor of theology and former chair of the Ekhart Society .
2008–2009: Stephen Kinzer, a prize-winning journalist with the Boston Globe and New York Times.
2007–2008: David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
2006–2007: Leon Lederman, Nobel prize-winning physicist who was the inaugural chair.