Ian Baucom

Baucom joined Middlebury in 2025, after serving as executive vice president and provost and the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. 

A widely regarded leader in higher education, Baucom has long championed the role of colleges and universities as civic institutions. He has empowered teaching, research, and learning to engage the urgent challenges of our time by building partnerships across a broad spectrum of disciplines: neuroscience and biotech, the humanities, environmental resilience, global Black studies, the visual and performing arts, digital technology, and artificial intelligence. As a scholar, teacher, mentor, administrator, and colleague whose work has influenced individuals and organizations here and around the world, he has been a steadfast advocate for the work of education in changing lives and advancing the promise of democracy.

Baucom had been provost of UVA since 2022 and was dean of its College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences for the preceding eight years. He arrived at UVA following a distinguished career at Duke, where he was a professor of English, chair of the English Department, and director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. He also served as president of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international body for scholarship at 200 research organizations in 30 countries around the world. Baucom taught English at Yale after earning his doctoral and master’s degrees there in English and African studies, respectively. His bachelor’s degree, in political science, is from Wake Forest.

Appointed to the Middlebury presidency by the Board of Trustees in January 2025, Baucom began his tenure on July 1, 2025. He will be officially installed in an inauguration ceremony on November 2, 2025.

Baucom’s wife, Wendy, also attended Wake Forest and has a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a writer. They have five adult children and a teenage son.