About IIE

Jonathan S. Holloway

President and CEO, Henry Luce Foundation

Jonathan Holloway is the President and CEO of the Henry R. Luce Foundation. Prior to joining Luce, Holloway served as the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, from July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2025.

Holloway was provost of Northwestern University from 2017 to 2020 and a member of the faculty of Yale University from 1999 to 2017.  At Yale, he served as Dean of Yale College and the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies.

Holloway’s scholarly work specializes in post-emancipation U.S. history with a focus on social and intellectual history.

He is the author of African American History: A Very Short Introduction and The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, February 2023 and February 2021, respectively). He also published Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013), both with the University of North Carolina Press. He edited Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (New York University Press, 2005) and coedited Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century (Notre Dame University Press, 2007). He wrote the introductions for the 2015 edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (Yale University Press) and Kelly Miller’s Race Adjustment (Columbia Global Reports, in press). He is working on a new book, A History of Absence: Race and the Making of the Modern World.

He serves on boards of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Gates-Cambridge Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of International Education.

Holloway is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. He is a Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He received a bachelor’s degree with honors in American studies from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.