Honoring Our Women Faculty and Academic Leaders
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2025, the School of Arts and Sciences celebrates its commitment to gender equality and the empowerment and advancement of women, be they students, faculty, staff or community members.
Throughout its history, SoAS has drawn on its talented and dedicated pool of women faculty to provide leadership and guidance to our students, school and university. To this day, they continue to play pivotal roles in advancing academia and providing invaluable support to the university’s operations.
One such early example was the late Dr. Irene Faffler who assumed multiple leadership roles, as chair of the Humanities Department and then as academic dean at the Beirut College for Women (BCW), which became the Beirut University College (BUC) in 1973.
Another academic leader was Dr. Layla Nimah, a long-time pillar of the school, who assumed the deanship of the Beirut Campus in 1993-1994 when BUC transitioned to LAU. Dr. Nimah went on to serve as LAU’s first vice president for Student Development and Enrollment Management until her retirement in 2007. She was succeeded by Professor of English Literature Elise (Lisa) Salem, who continues to serve in this capacity.
When LAU established the position of school dean in 1996, its first occupants in SoAS were the late Dr. Hadia Harb and Dr. Nuhad Saliby Akl (1996-2003) on the Beirut and Byblos campuses, respectively. Upon Dr. Harb’s retirement in the fall of 2003, Professor of English Samira Aghacy—previously the chair of the Humanities Department on the Beirut campus—took office.
Dr. Aghacy served as SoAS Dean in Beirut until September 2011. She went on to assume the directorship of the Arab Institute for Women (AiW), then known as the Institute for Women Studies in the Arab World. Professor of English Cathia Jenainati upheld this tradition of women leaders as SoAS dean between September 2019 and August 2023.
The current structure of SoAS features many talented women in positions of academic leadership. The associate dean is a woman, while women faculty lead six out of the school’s nine academic departments and direct four out of the six school’s institutes and centers.
These are only a handful of the women who have inspired and steered our school to excellence. To them all, past and present, we say: Thank you.