THE DIGITAL REPOSITORY FOR THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
"The sun will rise, the sun will set, and God willing, it will rise again."
University president and professor Jonathan Scott Holloway was born on July 26, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Kay Trent Holloway and Wendell M. Holloway. He graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, in 1985 and received his A.B. degree in American studies in 1989 from Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in history in 1991, 1993, and 1995, respectively, from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
From 1994 to 1999, Holloway served as an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the history and African American studies faculty of Yale University in 1999 as assistant professor, becoming associate professor in 2002, professor in 2004, and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies in 2015. He served as Master (later Head) of Calhoun College (later Grace Hopper College) at Yale from 2005 to 2014, when he became the first African American dean of Yale College. In 2017, Holloway became the first African American provost of and a professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. In 2020, Holloway joined the faculty and became the first African American president of Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Holloway’s books include Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2014), and The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (2021).
Holloway has served on the boards of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Universities Research Association, the Institute of International Education, the Academic Leadership Institute, the Organization of American Historians, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Illinois Humanities, the National Humanities Alliance, and the Society for United States Intellectual History. Holloway is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians and a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also has served as chair of the governing body of Yale’s residential colleges, on New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s Restart and Recovery Commission and as co-chair of his Wealth Disparity Task Force, and on the New Jersey Assembly Speaker’s Economic Advisory Council.
Holloway has been the recipient of the William Clyde DeVane Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College, an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellowship at Harvard University.
Holloway and his wife, Aisling Colón, live in Piscataway, New Jersey. They have two children, Emerson Kay Holloway and Ellison Becket Holloway.
Jonathan Scott Holloway was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on December 15, 2021.