Credit: Barry Bienstock

Jan Ellen Lewis, who has been named dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Newark, is examining how the founding fathers of the United States grappled with the challenge presented by women and slaves to their egalitarian ideology.

Jan Ellen Lewis has been appointed acting dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-Newark (FAS-N) effective January 1, 2007. Edward Kirby, who had served as dean since summer 2002, will go on sabbatical January 1 and will then return to the FAS-N faculty.

Lewis, who has taught American history on the Newark campus since 1977, is the Rutgers chair of the Federated History Department of Rutgers-New Jersey Institute of Technology. She also teaches in the history doctoral program at Rutgers in New Brunswick and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University. Lewis also previously acted as director of the Graduate History Program. An internationally celebrated Jeffersonian scholar, Lewis specializes in Colonial and early national history.

Lewis teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at Rutgers in Newark, whose history faculty are joined with those at NJIT in a single federated department that offers an integrated curriculum and joint undergraduate and graduate degree programs. She is the author of “The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia” (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and co-author of several other books, including a college history textbook, “Making a Nation” (Prentice Hall, 2002).

Her current editorial projects are an examination of how the founding fathers grappled with the challenge presented by women and slaves to their egalitarian ideology (Cambridge University Press), and the second volume of the “Penguin History of the United States,” covering the years 1760-1830.

Lewis has served as chair of the Committee of Women Historians of the American Historical Association and of the New Jersey Historical Commission, as well as on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of Southern History and Virginia History. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, the Center for the History of Freedom at Washington University, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

Lewis received her master’s and doctoral degrees in both history and American studies from the University of Michigan and her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College.