Donna Heiland

Donna Heiland is Vice President at The Teagle Foundation, where she oversees the day to day operations of the Foundation's headquarters in New York City, works with the President on strategic planning and program development / implementation (including all grantmaking), and supervises program as well as general office staff. She is also Secretary of the Corporation. Donna's work at Teagle draws on both her experience as Director of Fellowship Programs at the American Council of Learned Societies, and her experience at Vassar College, where she was Associate Professor of English, taught regularly in the Women's Studies Program, and served (briefly) as Director of Teaching Development.

Donna earned her B.A. in English (Honors) from the University of Western Ontario (1981), and Ph.D. in English from Yale University (1988). Having begun her academic career as an editor of James Boswell, she has since shifted her focus to the study of fiction, especially of the gothic as it developed in the eighteenth century and beyond. She is the author of Gothic and Gender: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2004), and her articles have appeared in essay collections and journals, including Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Life, and Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry and Literature Compass. She continues to pursue her scholarly interests as her foundation responsibilities allow, and her most recent writing grows directly out of her work at Teagle. With Rachelle Brooks, of Northwestern University, she has co-authored an article entitled “Accountability, Assessment and Doctoral Education: Recommendations for Moving Forward,” which appeared in the September 2007 issue of the European Journal of Education.